The Food Project: Youth. Food. Community.

Serving Pickles in the CafeteriaThis year, The Food Project has served as the Massachusetts host site for the brand new FoodCorps fellowship program. FoodCorps is an Americorps-affiliated fellowship program that deploys service members across the country to battle childhood obesity by teaching nutrition and helping to bring high-quality, healthy food to public schools.

Service Member Grace Cherubino works at Beeman's Elementary School and Veterans Elementary School in Gloucester, Mass. She runs in-school and after-school programming, helps to start school gardens, and works with teachers, administrators, and community groups to bring more nutrition to Gloucester public schools. The following blog was written by Grace about an elementary school lesson about celery. Check out the Gloucester FoodCorps blog for more pictures and stories.

Last week's 'Veggie-of-the-Week' was celery again, but this time it was being introduced to the older students at Veteran's and Beeman (3rd-5th grades). To fully showcase this glorious vegetable, we did celery experiments in which we placed celery with food coloring in a jar; played a water-transport relay race game where students had to BE parts of a celery plant and help get water from the roots to the leaves; and made 'ants on a log'!

I also had students come up with alternate names for Ants on a Log, and here are a few of my favorites:

Spiders on the Sand

Birds on a Branch

Pirates on a Plank

Ticks on a Log

Sharks in the Ocean

We also continued to celebrate Pickle Pioneer Day by tasting little cucumber gherkins and whole pickled beets after school. The Pickled Beets made for some silly bright pink tongues!