Into the Outside

A (Fresh) Direct Connection for Students

This past Thursday, representatives from FreshDirect, the Long Island City-based online grocery delivery company, visited two second grade classrooms at one of our partner schools.  Their presentation on New York State produce kicked off a semester-long partnership this spring between Into the Outside and FreshDirect.  FreshDirect's produce and environmental experts will help students investigate plant lifecycles, healthy, local food choices, and stewardship.  The students will discover links between local produce and sustainable eating and will deepen their understanding of how fruits and vegetables travel from the farm to the table.  It's all very topical, as bioregionalism and the locavore movement are fast becoming New York City buzzwords.  This program allows FreshDirect and Into the Outside to bring a dialogue about growing, farming, and eating into public school classrooms, where students will be able to study plants holistically in all of their forms, from seeds to salads.

Thursday's presentation was a perfect way to kickoff this project.  FreshDirect shared with the students many unique items, from sheep's milk Camembert and curly kale, to a variety of seafood and New York State apples.  They divided their presentations into four "seasons": winter was all about vermicomposting (that's composting with red wiggler worms!), spring was about seafood, summer - dairy, and autumn, of course, was dominated by apples. 

Throughout the program, students will learn how people depend on and modify their physical environments, and discover how available natural resources help people make decisions about eating, growing, and giving in their communities (all learning targets that fall within  New York State's 2nd grade social studies core curriculum). FreshDirect's very topical emphasis on local produce makes these standards relevant, as our state's rural and urban food-producing communities grow increasingly interconnected.

In the top picture, a student tastes and rates three different New York apple varieties at the fall station, while in the bottom pic, students listen as FreshDirect's cheese buyer describes dairy sources (sheep, goat, and cow) in the Hudson Valley.

Word of the Day

"Join forces", "get together", "cooperate". These are the words that make up the meaning of "collaborate". Last week, ITO and FreshDirect announced a collaboration that we believe will help a group of second grade students at one of our partner schools learn a great deal about food and nutrition. This partnership reflects a collaboration with a company that wants to impact a community by sharing its resources, including its team of experts. This joint effort reinforces my belief that if you have an area of expertise, then we can provide a way for you to help educate our students. Over the next few months, we will provide insight into the unique learning experiences that happen as a result of this collaboration. We hope these posts prove to be inspiring so if you or anyone you know works for a company that wants to "join forces" with ITO, drop us a note. We'd love to hear from you.

Gilded Lions and Jeweled Horses

It always seems like I post about fabulous exhibits right before they're about to close.  But this one, "Gilded Lions and Jeweled Horses: The Synagogue to the Carousel" at the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan is not to be missed.  It closes March 23.  The premise of the show is deceptively simple: Eastern European Jewish woodcarvers, who cut their teeth designing Torah arks for their hometown synagogues, immigrated to the United States and essentially built Coney Island, one carousel horse at a time.  Master woodcarvers like immigrants Marcus Charles Illions and Charles Carmel managed huge carousel-making studios in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side, turning out many of the animals that defined an era in American leisure.  They provided a specialized, ornately-wrought product at a time when Coney Island was evolving into "the entertainment capital of the world."  And they also worked in America at a time, the early 20th century, when high art and pop culture began to interact in weird and dynamic new ways.  As the curator of "Gilded Lions," Murray Zimiles, writes in his notes, "The work of Jewish immigrant woodcarvers exemplified the ways in which both the sacred and the worldly found room for each other in New World society."

The exhibit weaves its fascinating story from the top floor down to the first.  Don't try, like I did, to buck the suggestion and go first floor up; the natural progression of the exhibit doesn't make nearly as much sense.  If you follow the path, you'll have an opportunity to examine the Torah ark lions up close first.  Then you'll see, on the next floor down, how directly carousel animal design borrows from these sacred and mythical representations.   Look closely: the tails are positioned exactly!  The nostrils flare in the same way!  The eyes, often red or gilt in the Torah arks, take on similarly bright jewel forms in Coney Island merry-go-round ponies!  I can just imagine student excitement over these observations: the same artists carved both, so obviously there are similarities.  More than anything, the exhibit is about cultural diffusion and assimilation, about how proud cultural traditions from everywhere have influenced what we understand as "American life."  "Gilded Lions," like all American immigrant history, is a patchwork, crazy quilt story that both retains and assimilates its cultural products. 

Even if you can't get there until after "Gilded Lions" closes, the American Folk Art Museum, sometimes unfortunately referred to as "that museum next to MoMA," is a valuable resource any time of the year.  The permanent collection challenges students' and teachers' definitions of Art and art-making.  It makes us all think more critically about the impacts of skilled artists, from all over the world, on the landmarks of American culture, from our houses of worship to our pleasure palaces.

Green Carts

There's no doubt that the local foods movement is gaining support across New York City, as citizens seek to more socially responsible, transparently-produced, and community-based foods.  Due in part to the eloquent argument of authors like Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma), Greenmarket popularity is soaring, and more people are researching where and how to get fresh produce, straight from the farm to the urban table.  But there has always been a disconnect between these upper middle class and food-savvy locavores and the millions of New Yorkers (including me) whose most "local food" is the commodified stuff from the bodega next door. 

Now the city is rolling out its ambitious new Green Carts program, which will bring fresh fruits and veggies to low-consumption, food-isolated neighborhoods over the next two years.  A thousand permits will be issued, and approved curbside vendors will, perhaps as early as late spring, be selling apples and celery.  Amid opposition from supermarket lobbies and council opponents who fear the carts will squeeze out small business competition, legislation passed last Wednesday, and green carts could soon be coming to a street corner near you.  Check out these current articles for further reading:

350 produce sellers OK'd for Brooklyn (Daily News)
A Streetcart Named Healthy (NYTimes Op-ed)
Aiming to Put More Carts and Better Food on the Streets (NYTimes)

I'm most curious to hear what New York City public school students think about all this!  Will they patronize the green carts, or regard them as an annoyance?  Perhaps because the legislation is rife with controversy, the issue is a perfect current events persuasive writing prompt.  You might ask your students to research the issue: what is a green cart?  why does the city say we need them?  why do certain grocers oppose the legislation?  Perhaps set up a mock council meeting, and allow your students to defend their researched viewpoints. 

Encourage them to think about the many different food distributors in their communities: where do they get their food on a daily basis?  (Here's where a week's worth of food logs are enlightening).  You might want to take trips to the bodega, the street vendor, the nearest grocery store, or a slightly bigger grocery store further away.  You can ask them the same basic question at each location: what is being sold?  Then throw the Green Cart monkey wrench into the local food scene: What, if anything (eating habits, competition, selection, health), changes with the presence of green carts?  If nothing else, it'd be fascinating to find out from students how they feel about what they eat.

Bed-Stuy's Proud History: A Must See

For those of you who have not heard of the Weeksville Heritage Center, it's an absolute must in the study of New York History. Located on Hunterfly Road off of Bergen street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Center preserves a row of four wood-framed houses, the last standing remnants of one of the earliest independent African American societies in the United States. In 1838, eleven years after slavery was abolished in New York City, James Weeks purchased a plot of land from Henry C. Thompson, upon which he built houses to sell to other African American families seeking community and a safe place to live. The community grew very rapidly, with its own schools, churches, an orphanage, an old-age home, many black-owned businesses, and one of the country's first African American newspapers, Freedman's Torchlight.

The settlement had been all but forgotten until 1968 when these four buildings were spotted from the air by historian James Hurley and pilot Joseph Haynes, who subsequently launched an archaeological dig and launched a neighborhood campaign to rally for its preservation. The site is now home to the Weeksville Heritage Center, dedicated to the restoration of the houses, a center for community education and an integral part of Bedford-Stuyvesant's neighborhood revitalization projects.

I brought two fourth grade classes to the Center this week, and they received the houses with curiosity and delight. Three of the houses are restored and furnished to represent three periods of time in the history of Weeksville, the 1860s, 1900s, and 1930s. The students were very excited to examine each room, mouths agape at the size of the bathtub used by an 11-person family, impressed by the picture of Frederick Douglas on the mantle of the house representing the 1900's, and surprised to hear that Jazz music was forbidden to be played on the phonograph of the prohibition-era house, as the Baptist family opted for Gospel music only.

For a little side-note on the school history of Weeksville, Colored School #2 was founded in 1847 when blacks were not allowed in public schools, became Public School 68 in 1867, and merged with P.S. 83 (an all-white school) in 1890 to become one of the first integrated schools (both teaching staff and students) in the nation. The Weeksville Heritage Center hosts events and family art workshops as well as programming for students looking for something to do over the April break. Be sure to check it out.