Abstract

In this chapter I reframe Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard Project at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California, as an innovative work not simply of commercial/school partnership, but of educational thought. Explicitly inspired by Waters’ work as a Montessori teacher and as a restaurant owner prominent in the international Slow Food Movement, ESY is constructing a new paradigm for school lunch in the present climate change era. This new paradigm renovates school lunch’s conceptual continuity with once-canonical thought about children’s schooling, in which deeply gendered foodways have been figured significantly. This theoretical inquiry on ESY concludes with a caution to those who would simply claim school gardening as a new best practice without also providing a social-ethical critique of current school lunch practices.