Stephanie Alexander

 

For Stephanie Alexander, food is more than food. It’s about pleasure, health, and making connections—to family, the environment, to life itself. Hence the Kitchen Garden Foundation, which Alexander piloted 15 years ago, is a schools-based program dedicated to teaching children the skills to grow and cook their own seasonal produce, and the rewards that come with it. The Hamper Store talked to Alexander about the genesis of the Foundation, the philosophy behind it and its achievements to date.

 

This interview was conducted by Raffaele Caputo at Alexander’s Abbotsford residence in July 2016.

 

You established the Kitchen Garden Foundation in 2001, how far has it come since then?

 

It’s absolutely huge. Here we are in 2016 and we have more than 800 schools actively involved in the project, and we have more than 400 new members joining the program online. We can no longer physically get around a country the size of Australia and so we offer membership through an online service.

 

How does the program work online?

 

It means that every school interested in joining gets in touch with us and we talk to them about where they’re at and what they’ve got. Some of them have little gardens, some of them have no gardens, some of them have a kitchen space they think they could use, and what we offer are ways of getting them started with minimal infrastructure. We can offer them training and a lot more resources, and an opportunity to join our ‘Shared Table’, which is our members-only area of the website where they can see what everyone else is doing, and they can put up images too.

 

The Kitchen Garden Foundation has an amazingly resource-rich website. There are at least 500 resources and activities available, and help on very specific topics like how to run a meeting, how to fund-raise, how to approach local businesses, how to train a volunteer, how to build a non-dig garden. You name it and it is there, from the most basic things to quite specific things intended for classroom use. Any school that is serious about implementing a kitchen garden can be sure of getting lots of support and assistance.

 

When you talk about membership, is that to specific schools or opened to a broader school membership?

 

We are opening membership to early learning centres because they have shown a lot of interest. That’s new for us. Primary and secondary schools have always been eligible, though we have fewer secondary schools at this time. What we stress is the program’s flexibility and that it can be done in lots of different ways.

 

By 2001 you had achieved a great deal in the food industry and in your book A Cook’s Life [Penguin-Lantern, 2012], you ask yourself why take on a huge challenge like the Kitchen Garden Foundation. How much of a leap was it for you?

 

When I started the Foundation I had absolutely no idea how it was going to grow, and I didn’t have a game plan. I didn’t say to myself, 'This is going to become a national program!' I just wanted to make sure the pilot program that I was putting in place at Collingwood College was going to work. That was really how I started: get a program up-and-running, work with it, talk to teachers, and see how the students respond. Then it just organically grew. We got a little bit more money and that allowed us to say, 'Well, we now need to do a school in the country.' Then we got a little bit more money and so we’d try a school in the outer suburbs that had expressed interest.

 

Schools expressed interest quite early on once news got out of what was happening at Collingwood College. But it never occurred to me at that stage that it would become as big as it has become.

 

On the personal side, do you see the Kitchen Garden Foundation as a continuum of what you were doing in the restaurant business?

 

It seems to me that it is a continuum! Part of my drive is to make food a pleasure for people and that was very much a motive for running restaurants. And in the restaurants I wanted people to be enthusiastic and I think that’s also what I want with young kids.

 

Federal Government funding for the Foundation dried up in 2015 and I suspect it was because of economic rationalist reasons. What would you say to policy makers?

 

Our very first government funding came from the Victorian Government and so what we had achieved in Victoria spurred on the national government. The last lot of the money from the Australian Government was definitely seen as a three-year project and that finished in June 2015 and it wasn’t renewed. At this point we do not have any funding from the Australian Government. But in the last state budget we have been given a smallish grant of $1.5 million over three years by the Victorian State Government to support a further 250 schools in Victoria.

 

To me it is common sense that if you are spending lots of money and time thinking about the health of our children, which seems to be a major issue for the media and various politicians, it would make sense to say that we agree there is a problem and that prevention is better than cure. There is also the fact that prevention in this case is absolutely engaging and enjoyable for the children, so why wouldn’t we make this project part of every child’s experience.

 

I have a mandarin tree in my garden and it’s full of fruit at the moment, mostly still green, but this morning there were two ripe ones that looked like Christmas baubles. I picked one and ate it and it was just so beautifully fresh, juicy and sweet, and the other I saved for my 13 year old with whom I know I'll have a bit of a battle to get to eat the mandarin. Now, I could walk into a supermarket and there will be a range of pre-packaged sweets and cakes and so on, they look great and to kids they are just as attractive as Christmas baubles. How would I convince my 13 year old that the mandarin is full of nutrition whereas the other food has less nutrition, is more hollow?

 

Well, you take a positive approach and I would say that the way you would change perception is to involve the child. In our program at schools, if a child has planted their own mandarin tree, has put it in the ground when quite small and by the time the tree is two or three years old it is actually fruiting, any child gets extremely excited and engaged by this. A mandarin tree is probably a difficult example because it takes a while to fruit. But if that was broad beans for example, or, frankly, even if it was parsley or radishes, something that is fairly speedy to grow or grows in one growing season, kids do get engaged with the fact that they have actually planted it, they have actually watered it, they have actually mulched it, and they’ve watched it grow. Then they have picked it when it is ready and have taken it into the kitchen and have done something with it. They have sat down and not only have had the pleasure of eating it, they hear their friends say, 'Hey, I really like this!' There is a real boost in self-esteem and they are being exposed to a flavour they possibly have not had before.

 

I don’t think there is anything I can do, or our program can do, to counteract the billions of dollars spent by advertisers to convince kids that really what they want is an ice cream or a block of chocolate. And there is nothing wrong with eating an ice cream or a block of chocolate, but what we want to do is present alternatives. There is another way of looking at food and looking at the environment without being too serious about it. We don’t demonise anything but we make sure that the majority of what is prepared is based on vegetables and herbs, seeds and grains. Dishes that use lots of sugar or butter are treats and for now and then only. Which doesn’t mean that the kids have to have mandarins straight off the tree or they have to eat things raw, for example. I know many kitchen garden schools have very productive orchards, and they make tarts and pies and they preserve their fruit and so they do use sugar. But it’s not the only thing that happens in their day.

 

 Stephanie Alexander

 

So it’s a matter of asking, 'Where does my food come from?'

 

The kids make that connection themselves very quickly. They also make a connection that says, 'We’re now picking broccoli in our garden and we’ve got broad beans, but there are no tomatoes in the garden. Why are there no tomatoes in the garden?' Because it’s cold! 

 

They can look out of a window and see a tree or plant and understand that these do not exist independently — they need soil and sun and water and air.

 

And the garden has to be cared for in other ways. The students know to use mulch, that every now and then they need to put a seaweed tonic around their plants, they understand about building supports for their plants, and they understand about climate. They understand about water being terribly important in Australia, and no school with an active kitchen garden program can do it without a water plan.

 

When you started the Kitchen Garden Foundation obesity was a big issue, is obesity still the main issue?

 

I think it’s the main issue for government, but it wasn’t my starting point. It’s a subtle difference in emphasis. I don’t like to talk about the Foundation as being only a response to obesity, yet I do have to talk in that language to government. What I want is for more children to understand the joy of eating well, to understand how satisfying it is to be able to pick things from your own garden and to actually learn how to make simple and delicious dishes from ingredients they have grown and harvested.  To me choosing fresh season food means that of course my food is healthy as well as delicious, but I don’t stress health.

 

Because that pretty much takes the fun out of it?

 

Absolutely, and no child wants to have a finger wagged at them and be told they mustn’t do this or they mustn’t do that. It isn’t necessary to do that to get their interest. All you have to do is say, ‘Okay, we’re going to roll this pastry out, we’ve got this silverbeet and we’ve got ricotta, and we’re going to smash garlic cloves, and so on.’ You don’t have to mention the word health, even though they still are going to eat something that is wonderfully healthy. It’s a very important shift of emphasis and what it does is changes attitudes and behaviour.

 

I remember reading in one of your “Stephanie’s Garden” columns for Gourmet Traveller [December 2011] about a Greek neighbour who was concerned that you had planted spinach too close to garlic and I’m wondering whether immigration is somehow invisibly enfolded in Kitchen Garden Foundation?

 

Absolutely, most government schools have a mix of nationalities and one of the things that the Kitchen Garden Foundation tries to do is celebrate difference: 'This way of cooking an eggplant is very common in the Greek community,' or 'This is how it’s done in Turkey,' or 'Here we have a Chinese way of cooking eggplant.' Difference is celebrated so that the understanding for the kids is that there is always more than one way of doing something. You often find children in a class who’ll say, 'My grandmother makes fritters out of these things,' and then the teacher hopefully says something like, 'Well, ask your grandmother to send her recipe in,' or 'Would she like to come in herself?' Often she doesn’t but sometimes she does.

 

And because the Foundation has grown far and wide, it has to include indigenous food as well.

 

Not every garden is going to have bush food but almost every Kitchen Garden program in the north of Australia definitely has both bush food and Asian food. I was at a school in Darwin a few weeks ago and they had the most extraordinary harvest table. They had things I’d never seen before, all sorts of melons, all sorts of green vine-like things, Malabar spinach, kaffir limes, and indigenous rosellas. All of that was what the school grew in their garden because of their climate, and, again, we might have a child in another part of Australia who asks, 'Why can’t we grow paw-paw?' Well, that’s perfect for saying, 'We can’t because our climate doesn’t permit it.' We might talk about paw-paw and say what a great thing it is, but that you’ll have to wait until you go on a holiday to north Queensland before you can eat it.

 

 Medibank

 

Around the same time that government funding dried up for the Foundation, Medibank came on board as a partner, do you feel that more and more corporations are realising that the business of doing business is actually not independent of common welfare?

 

I think more and more businesses understand that they have a responsibility to put an percentage of their budget into social enterprise. Medibank had a project running for a long time about living better and about future generations living better, and so their message and our message meshed very well. With their financial assistance we are able to deliver our messages more effectively.

 

I remember an occasion when I was a kid and the season for broad beans had just finished and I was in the garden helping my dad. I was pulling the old stalks out of the ground and tossing them to one side. My dad stopped me and said to dig the stalks into the ground, explaining that it would enrich the soil. Looking back I see that as life knowledge my father was handing down to me. It seems schools are more and more taking up certain responsibilities that once pertained to the family.

 

Whether we like it or not, I think we have to face the fact that at least two generations have lost a connection with their food. I am fully aware that our migrant families are now second and third generations and many of them have a different attitude. Certainly the grand parents and most of the parents still feel pretty connected to food.

 

But there is a problem with the Anglo-Saxon community. Many of the kids we come across from all levels of society have not had positive modelling as far as food knowledge goes. Their parents have been caught up in the whole idea of convenience and anything that was quick was preferable to something that required a bit of effort. It is quite likely that for many of these kids their mothers and fathers wouldn’t know what to do with an eggplant or a bulb of fennel or even how to use fresh herbs. Unless there is an intervention, what hope has that kid got to withstand the billions of advertising dollars when he or she does not know how to make mashed potato, or not know how to make an omelette, or has never planted anything in the soil or watched anything grow and ripen. That’s a very big gap and it has implications for when those kids leave home, and, incidentally, I think that’s one reason for the huge success of The Cook’s Companion [Penguin-Lantern, 1996, 2004 & 2014] because kids going to college or going into a share house soon realise they can’t afford to eat in a cafe every night and they have to start cooking but don’t know how because they were never taught. If that doesn’t happen at home, where do they learn it? The answer is they don’t.

 

Driving around Melbourne it is impossible not to notice the amount of construction of apartment buildings going on, where space for growing your own food is limited or non-existent, and which suggests a lifestyle of convenience. How can one integrate the philosophy of the Kitchen Garden Foundation into the lifestyle that these apartments suggest?

 

We tell people you can grow things in a small space. Here [in Abbotsford] I have a vegetable box where I have been able in the summer to grow my own tomatoes, beans, lettuce and some herbs, and that’s enough for me here. In Hawthorn I had a much more extensive patch and that was enough for me to look after back then. You don’t need a paddock!

 

It’s an attitude?

 

It is an attitude and even if you say, ‘I’ve got no space’, well what you can do is have some herbs in some little pots and you can go to a farmer’s market. In Melbourne there are several fresh food markets and strip shopping where you are actually seeing food on display and not in a plastic box, and you can talk to people about the produce you’re buying. There are lots of ways to have a good food life and I wouldn’t want to be quoted as saying that the only possible way is to grow your own food, because that is unrealistic.

 

So it’s another way of thinking about lifestyle choices even though living in an apartment suggests a very particular lifestyle?

 

It’s best to say it has to do with priorities. If a great food life is a priority there are many ways to make it happen without spending a lot of money.

 

How do you see the future for the Kitchen Garden Foundation?

 

One of my achievements is that I have seen the Foundation grow into a very professional organisation. We have a capable CEO, staff who have expertise in teaching, in curriculum writing, in support services, and in IT. As long as we can access adequate funding to keep all those people being paid, the work will continue. I still believe that at some time or other the penny will drop for the Australian Government and realise that this is something that has to happen for all Australian children at some level. My role is to talk about what we do, to attend certain meetings, to be on the board, to be the person who sits down with politicians and, hopefully, does effective lobbying, I will also continue to go to training sessions at schools, where I learn a lot myself and appreciate the diversity amongst our program schools. I sometimes make little training videos so that when I can’t go, the schools can still get a bit of me with a bit of the Foundation’s philosophy as well. It is important that I include a certain amount of school visits in my schedule, otherwise you lose track and find I am talking in theory without actually watching the children. That’s my role at the moment and that will continue for the foreseeable future, let’s say for the next two or three years. After that I have no idea. I’m not very good at long-range planning.