Program gives “Food for Thought” a whole new meaning

First graders from Oak Bluffs Elementary School gathered in a circle at Island Grown Initiative’s (IGI) farm in Vineyard Haven. All bundled up in their coats, the children listened as Astrid Tilton, a gleaning manager, explained how the nonprofit collects all extra, or surplus, crops to avoid creating food waste.

“Gleaning means gathering food that we’re not going to sell. We’re just going to share it for free with people,” Tilton said. “Our job is going to be to pick up the potatoes, get the dirt off of them, shake off any big clumps, and put them into containers.” 

The group then traipsed over to a field with long beds of unearthed potatoes. Tilton advised the students to avoid the potatoes with “yucky spots,” and the eager gatherers began scooping up the potatoes from the soil and tossing them into buckets.

“Look at what happened to my knees,” first-grader Elizabeth Kuester said about her soil-covered jeans.

Chase Holenko uncovered a heart-shaped potato, a common occurrence during the glean. He then held up another find: a soil-covered earthworm. “It’s a huge worm,” he excitedly pointed out.

Instead of putting her potatoes in the buckets, Everly Foster found a new way to store her crops: stuffed in the pockets of her jacket. “Pocket potatoes!” she exclaimed.

When it was time for the students to leave, several buckets were filled to the brim with the gleaned potatoes. 

The field trip for the Oak Bluffs students earlier this month is one of many organized by Island Grown Schools — IGI’s farm-to-school program serving Island youth from preschool to high school. This year marks the 20th year for both IGI and its school program. And the nonprofit, which now serves around 700 students a year through these field trips, plans to expand the program with a new education center.

Later in the afternoon that same day, students from Leigh Fairchild-Coppoletti’s global studies class at Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School toured the farm. In class, the students had read a story by The Times about the “Food Is Medicine” model and about a partnership between IGI and Island Health Care that exemplifies that model.

Noli Taylor, IGI co-executive director, spearheaded Island Grown Schools after receiving an MV Vision Fellowship Award in 2007 to launch a farm-to-school program. Due to prevalent issues such as food insecurity and diet-related disease, Taylor said, she launched the initiative to educate Island youth about healthy food practices.

“Looking at the state of our food system, we knew that there are so many major challenges that are going to take generations to solve, and we need to start engaging young people in thinking about food differently and having real literacy around food,” Taylor said. “We need to do food differently. We wanted to start with kids, and we wanted to start in the schools.”

When the program first launched, she said, each school’s garden program was tailored to its particular interests. The Oak Bluffs School, for example, implemented its first school garden. Now, Island Grown Schools works with all seven of the Island’s public schools and 11 preschools.

“Some schools started by putting in school gardens. Some schools wanted to start in their cafeteria around local food sourcing. Some wanted to start in the classrooms with food education,” Taylor said. “But within the first two years, we had learning gardens installed at all of our schools. It was the start of what has become this incredible 20 years of developing a really comprehensive community food education program for our children. Now, an entire generation of Island kids have grown up with food education as a regular part of what they experience in their school day.”

And when school cafeteria directors expressed interest in incorporating more produce from Island farms, IGI was inspired to launch its gleaning program in 2009 to prevent surplus crops from going to waste. 

Taylor estimates that roughly 700 students from the Island’s 11 preschools and seven public schools — including all K–12 schools — take field trips to IGI’s farm every year during the fall and spring. To facilitate field trips during the winter, IGI is fundraising to construct an education center featuring classrooms and a kitchen space, to be operational by next fall.

“You can learn so much from visiting a regenerative farm like ours about climate change, soil, water cycles, and now also about nutrition and cooking,” Taylor said.

A major component of Island Grown Schools is its Curriculum Toolkit, an online and searchable database consisting of curricula for all ages and grade levels. The curricula cover a myriad of topics, such as food systems, gardens, healthy eating, and soil, through project-based learning. Some of these activities include organizing plant sales, butter making, and foraging.

Taylor noted that the curricula stresses the cross-curricular nature of food education. 

“Every subject can be taught through the lens of food in a hands-on way that supports different kinds of learners and helps every kid feel successful in their learning,” she said.

Emily Armstrong, Island Grown Schools education director, said she hopes that students leave the program with both better culinary skills and knowledge about food from various cultures.

“Our goal is when they go off into the world, they have an understanding about how to read a recipe and how to feed themselves,” Armstrong said. “There’s so much rich food history content that we are able to connect with … through that historical lens.”

Armstrong, who launched the program’s preschool branch, also aims for Island Grown Schools to educate children about soil.

“There’s such a misunderstanding that it’s dirt, but it’s really this alive thing … that is our responsibility to protect and take care of and steward,” Armstrong said. “Getting kids really passionate about that topic is something that we really love to do.”

Armstrong compares the evolution of Island Grown Schools to that of a garden.

“We started out as a seed 20 years ago. Now we have this robust garden, from my perspective, of kids that are thinking more critically about environmental issues and what their role is in that,” Armstrong said. “That has come out of them having this access to high-quality, experiential, place-based education.”