Park cooking: Youth find connections at Crissy Field Center Teaching Kitchen

By Emily Harwitz

This summer, the aroma of freshly baked bread and simmering spices filled the Crissy Field Center. It wasn’t coming from professional chefs, but a team of middle schoolers from the Urban Trailblazers program honing their cooking skills in the Teaching Kitchen. From food history to food-centered field trips, the kitchen allowed the youth to follow their curiosities—and their senses—to more deeply engage with the world around them. 

“We want to connect young people to the decisions they're making in the grocery store and get them to think about their ecological footprint,” said Ernesto Pepito, Associate Director of Youth Leadership at the Parks Conservancy. “Our hope is that they gain some leadership skills, too, when they're presenting to the class what dish they made and why it means something to them.”  

The six-week program kicked off with introductions to each other and to the fundamentals of reading, writing, and presenting a recipe. Homework was tasty: Bring in a meal of cultural and personal significance. Students spent the next several weeks dissecting, concocting, experimenting, and perfecting recipes, which became part of a collaborative cookbook they took home from the summer.  

Classes included knife skills, how to control heat on the stove, and how to pair flavors. Students also spent time sharpening their senses and building the rich vocabulary required to describe what they were doing. On a field trip to Alemany Farm, amongst rows of ripening vegetables, rich soil, and twittering birds, students participated in a nature journaling exercise where they reflected on what they observed through each of their senses.  

The origin of ingredients is central to appreciating food and our relationship with the earth, and students toured the Marin Farmer's Market with staff from the Agricultural Institute of Marin. They chatted with farmers, learned about how crops are grown, and sampled new fruits and vegetables. Students also visited the Japanese Tea Garden and Conservatory of Flowers to show there’s more to explore, even in their own backyards. 

Back in the kitchen, bread week was a hit. Bread is a staple food of many cultures around the world and there are as many ways to make it as there are hands to knead it. After discussing the global history of bread, students researched recipes and each chose a different loaf to bake and share with the class by telling the story of the recipe’s history.  

Over the course of the program, students developed personal recipes and personal connections with food and each other. 

Sam Tran, the Middle School Programs Manager at the Crissy Field Center who worked closely with the teaching kitchen, saw firsthand how the program changed participants’ lives. “At the beginning, there was one student who had no interest in cooking,” Tran says. “But with the kitchen program, he wanted to experiment more at home with his dad and express himself through cooking or baking.” His father said the student baked seven loaves of banana bread as he tested out different recipes. 

“Hearing that this student went home and kept experimenting, that's actually an outcome we didn't foresee,” Pepito says. “But it's really powerful that young people cross that threshold of fear or anxiousness around trying something in the kitchen, and are able to bring that home.”