Election Section

The February-March issue of Nick Jr., the national educators’ magazine operated by Nickelodeon children’s channel, lists Berkeley’s LeConte School as operating one of the 10 best elementary school cafeterias in America. 

While that is a significant national honor, the LeConte cafeteria doesn’t even operate the best food establishment at LeConte. That distinction goes to the student cooking class at the Russell Street school. 

On Thursday of last week, while the cafeteria was offering a salad bar and a warm pasta-and-meat dish shipped over from the school district’s central kitchen, students of teacher Jeanette Gearring’s fourth-grade class were putting together a fresh-cooked lunch of Indian cholé and cucumber raita, the curry so succulent you could smell it out in the hallway. It’s no knock on the cafeteria to say that their selections weren’t even in the running. 

Every Thursday at midday, half of the students of Ms. Gearring’s class come down to a cavernous, two-stove kitchen/classroom converted from a science room to spend an hour preparing a dish. The other half of the class spends the hour in one of the school’s three gardens at a Farm and Garden class, switching each week. In fact, every class at Le Conte spends two sessions a month in cooking and gardening classes. 

On Thursday, the cooking lesson starts with an explanation of the ingredients to be used, particularly the spices. Each spice bottle is held up and the taste and function of the contents explained, as well as the country of origin. 

Students are told to be careful of getting one particular spice on their clothes, since it’s used both for seasoning and as a dye. A piece of cloth is held up, one half of it a brilliant yellow, as a demonstration. “That’s what gives curry its yellow color,” the students are told. 

Next it’s on to herb chopping, and a practical tip. 

“I used to cut onions in a restaurant,” cooking teacher Kathy Russell tells the students. “And I couldn’t stop myself from crying. I even had to put on swim goggles. And then somebody told me to put a toothpick in my mouth, and that would stop it.” 

Toothpicks are passed all around, the students clamping them between their teeth after admonitions of “don’t talk with that in your mouth.” After a few moments of intense chopping, one boy pulled the toothpick out and declares, in amazement, “My eyes don’t burn!” Asked for an explanation by Gearring, Russell confesses that she’s not quite sure why. 

The room settles down to a low hum of activity as the students cut onions and garlic. (“Chop it up as small as you can; it’s calling ‘mincing.’”) and scrape seeds from the inside of cucumbers. The students keep a steady conversation among themselves while getting instruction from Russell and her fellow cooking teacher, Brenna Turman. 

Russell and Turman are BUSD employees, part of the regular Le Conte faculty, their salaries paid through funds provided to the district by the California Nutrition Network. Generally, their offerings sound less like classroom instruction, more like Saturday afternoon learning how to cook at your big sister’s house. (“What do you do with the cans, guys? That’s right. Recycle.” Or “How many of you have electric can openers?” And when more than half of the room raises hands: “My goodness! You’re going to get stuck on your next camping trip.”) 

But every so often, the teacher comes out: “Clear your cutting board as you’re working. You want to know what you’re cutting into your dish. Remember: clear, then clean, then cloth.” 

The last instructions are listed in 1, 2, 3 order on the class whiteboard, for emphasis. Meanwhile teacher Gearring sits on the edge of the class, alternately observing, helping with directions, and handling the few minor discipline problems.  

By now, a boy is busy stirring the garlic and onions in a skillet, and it’s beginning to smell like a meal will actually emerge. Soon, a group of students have crowded around the skillet, and Turman (the students call the cooking teachers “Chef Brenna” and “Chef Kathy”) is directing the addition of spices and garbanzo beans while regulating the temperature under the skillet and doing some additional stirring. “There,” she says, “let’s leave that for a minute.” 

Earlier, LeConte Gardening Coordinator Ben Goff (“Farmer Ben” to the students) explained that the cooking class menu is part of a coordinated district effort. “The cooking and gardening coordinators get together in a monthly meeting to decide on the harvest of the month. This month it’s legumes”—thus, the garbanzo beans—“in January it was citrus.” 

Products from the school’s gardens, in fact, end up on the lunch menu (“lettuce goes to the lunchroom for salads; garlic and onions go to the cooking class”), while some of the vegetables, such as carrots, get eaten fresh out in the garden. And later, Turman is found in the garden’s chicken pen, hunting for eggs to make egg salad. 

LeConte principal Patricia Saddler takes a break from a series of meetings to come out into the garden sun to encourage Turman in the egg salad production, which Saddler admits is a favorite dish of hers. Turman comes back with one brown and one white, but is disappointed that she has found no green egg. One hen, she says, regularly produces an egg slightly greener than a robin’s. It’s as if everyone had been dropped into a Dr. Seuss book. 

Meanwhile, back in the cooking class, the dish only takes five minutes or so to cook, about the time it would take to stand in line at the Shattuck Avenue McDonald’s, order your meal, and get it to your table. 

Soon, the teachers have filled small bowls for each student, and the class quiets down to the sound of spoons clinking on porcelain as food goes to mouth in a steady rhythm. The rhythm of teaching, too, continues, as Chef Brenna and Chef Kathy ask the students to identify what different types of tastes they find. “Salty? Spicy? Do you know what ‘savory’ means?” 

As the level in the bowls diminish, the students are asked to grade the dish. They respond silently with mostly thumbs-up signs. Turman explains that they adopted the thumb-signal response “because that cut out a lot of the ‘eeews’ we used to get.” 

The class hour is almost over, the last bit of rice and beans and yellow sauce are being scraped from the bottom of the bowls, and cleanup has begun. Each student is responsible for washing out his or her dish and bowl in preparation for the electric dishwasher, and then the tables are cleared, and wiped off. The students judge each other, critically, at each step: “You call that table clean?” 

The Daily Planet reporter is still working on his meal. A boy looks over at him, asks if he likes it. The student gets the thumbs-up back. It is actually an understatement. This could have been a dish in a restaurant. A good restaurant.