Wilton High School

Some of what is written below is from our course proposal in 2015 for our Farm To Table class...

We find ourselves disconnected from our farms and farmers, and from the story of what we eat.   As society started to move to cities and away from farms many local food sources have disappeared.  Food as we know it today is processed in enormous bulk and shipped halfway around the world before finding its way to our pantries.   It seems as if food comes from a shelf  in the supermarket.  One of the biggest trends in the culinary world today is the farm-to-table movement.

In our Farm To Table class, students (high school sophomores, juniors and seniors) will gain an understanding of how food is grown and what conditions create the best possible ingredients and flavors.  Students will help harvest, use, and store food products for present and future use, learning to use ingredients seasonally.  The class aims to guide students to live a more self-sustaining and healthy existence through food and its relationship to the environment.  Farm to Table will give students the understanding of seasonal crops, harvesting, storage and production. We hope students will come away with a respect for the land, its offerings and their diet through course objectives and information.  Using the already existing organic garden we are following the current trend in America of returning back to eating locally and seasonally. The culinary classes work collaboratively with the garden club advisor his organic gardening club to plant crops and harvest for class use and production.

To expand upon an already popular curriculum, the Farm to Table class will consist of students learning the lay of the land and the schedule of planting and harvesting.  Continuing on they will then harvest crops and cook with seasonal items.  Menus will be planned to coordinate with crops.  Items which cannot  be used immediately will be stored for future use through canning, pickling, dehydrating and freezing.  The stored items will be used in winter months.  The necessary tools used will be required kitchen appliances and storage facilities as well as a dehydrator and canning goods.  We are planning to work with Millstone Farm as well as utilize our existing organic garden to enhance our collaboration with the community, as well as current course offerings.  With the addition of a farm to table class we can collaborate with health classes and with environmental science classes.  Students will also be encouraged to use the library media center for research and marketing purposes related to the curriculum.  Long term goals would be to provide food to the staff on a scheduled basis using our resources from the garden.

Our nation is increasingly becoming more focused on sustainable agriculture and getting fresh fruits and vegetables into our diets, from First Lady Michelle Obama’s nationwide Let’s Move Campaign to Farmers’ Markets in practically every town in Fairfield County.  While this is evident, there is still very little education regarding sustainability at the high school level in our Connecticut community.  Wilton High School will be a leader in this area.  We will be following the trends of our nation and our community, and therefore connecting our students to the world at large.  Like our nation’s food trends, we will be placing an emphasis on locally sourced food, providing an increased availability of locally sourced foods, using fewer transport miles and therefore creating lower fuel emissions with less travel.