KIDS IN THE KITCHEN NO MORE
Carole Osterink
ccSCOOP Editor
01-10-10 - 6:30 p.m. - We have all heard about inner-city kids who think that food comes from the supermarket and whose experience of food is limited to fast food and processed food. The assumption is that these kids live in the deprived and impoverished neighborhoods of New York City, not amidst the agricultural bounty of Columbia County, but the truth is that many kids in Hudson, living only a few blocks from a farmers’ market that’s open half the year and only a few miles from any number of real working farms, have the same limited experience when it comes to food as kids living in Brooklyn or the Bronx.
A program at the Hudson Youth Center was changing all that. Called KINK, an acronym for Kids in the Kitchen, the program had as its instructor Carole Clark, master gardener and restaurateur who, at her Charleston restaurant on Warren Street, was a pioneer of the farm-to-chef movement in Columbia County. In the seven months of its existence, the program succeeded in introducing Hudson kids to new foods and new experiences and in giving them not only new knowledge and new skills but new confidence.
The program began in late spring with a grant from Kids in Motion, the Columbia County Healthcare Consortium’s childhood obesity prevention program. Kids would get exercise by planting and tending a vegetable garden, and they would learn about healthy eating by preparing and consuming the produce from their garden.
The first phase of the program was beset with problems. Word that the Youth Center was planning to remove trees and dig up the landscaped side lawn drew a summer storm of objections from homeowners in the vicinity of Third and Union and from Hudsonians concerned about the appearance of a principal gateway to the city. That problem was resolved to everyone’s satisfaction when the garden was created in raised beds, designed by landscape architect Elsa Leviseur, in the Youth Center parking lot. Around this time too, Youth Director Trudy Beicht connected with Carole Clark, who became the master gardener and chef for the program.
Although getting a late start, the planting of the garden was a community event. Kids were joined by volunteers from the yoga class for seniors to plant lettuces, cabbages, tomatoes, eggplants, and squash, as well as sunflowers and nasturtiums, in the raised bed kitchen garden. Many of the plants, as well as gardening tools, were donated by neighborhood residents and businesses.
The summer, however, was not kind to the child gardeners. The unrelenting rain turned the raised bed garden into containerized puddles, and the lack of sun stunted the development of the fruit, but, supplemented with produce from farmers’ markets, the program—then called “Gardening, Cooking, Eating”—moved ahead. In July, the children experimented with baking in two solar ovens on loan from Jody Rael at Sundog Solar. In August, kids from the program joined the county’s finest chefs and restaurateurs to offer their culinary creations—apricot energy bars baked in the solar ovens and vegetable frittatas made with eggs from Feather Ridge Farm—at Columbia County Bounty’s annual Taste of Columbia County. |
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Carole Clark and the kids planting the raised bed kitchen garden at the Youth Center in early June
Amy Eitelmann, from Sundog Solar, explaining to kids how
the solar ovens work |
At Taste of Columbia County, the kids from Hudson caught the attention of the chef from the Governor’s Mansion in Albany who invited them to provide one element of the menu for an event to be held at the mansion. This kind of recognition emboldened some to imagine that maybe, just maybe, Michelle Obama, whose promotion of gardening and healthy eating is well known, might be persuaded to come to Hudson to be part of next spring’s planting of the garden outside the Youth Center.
When the summer ended, the program—now called Kids in the Kitchen/Yoga Buddies (the kids get their exercise by doing yoga while they are waiting for sauces to simmer and lasagnas to bake)—moved indoors. There, in the Youth Center kitchen, under the direction of Clark, Terry Schaff, who taught the kids yoga, and three volunteers, the kids cooked the produce harvested from their garden, generously supplemented with fresh fruits and vegetables donated by Migliorelli’s Farm Market, just a block away at Warren and Third. Kids who had never seen or tasted fresh apricots or peaches—even though they’re grown just a few miles away—were experiencing them for the first time and using them to bake energy bars and tartlets. They were using unfamiliar vegetables with bizarre names like zucchini, eggplant, and kohlrabi to make unfamiliar dishes like stir fry, frittatas, lasagna, and stuffed vegetables. Kids were making their own pasta sauce. They were creating fresh salads with strange ingredients like red lettuce and radishes, and they were even making their own salad dressing. “The surprise and pleasure the kids experienced in discovering new foods defied the popular notion that children don’t like—and won’t eat—unfamiliar food,” Clark said.
Not only did the program introduce children to natural foods grown locally, it taught them process—how the natural ingredients become the foods we eat—and how to use cooking utensils and equipment safely. And it gave them very practical experience with math, doing the multiplying and dividing necessary to increase or decrease recipe amounts to produce the desired number of servings.
Another important aspect of the KINK/YB program was sitting down to eat what they had created. Kids for whom family dinner was not a nightly ritual were sitting down to a meal with their peers and the adult volunteers and learning not only table manners but the art of dinner conversation. Children often engaged in serious discussions over dinner at the Youth Center. Clark recalls in particular one dinnertime conversation about President Obama’s Promise Neighborhoods initiative to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone's accomplishments in other communities, which evolved into a discussion of wealth and the distribution of wealth.
Each six-week session of Kids in the Kitchen/Yoga Buddies culminated with a Family Supper hosted by the kids. Each child could invite two guests to come to the Youth Center for a meal that the children had planned and prepared themselves. This writer was fortunate enough to be on the guest list for the Family Supper held on December 22, and it was an amazing experience. Not only was the food excellent—a salad of mixed field greens with a homemade vinaigrette, a delicious vegetable lasagna, and freshly baked chocolate cake—the children were eager and gracious hosts, welcoming guests at the door, helping them find a seat at the table, serving the meal, inquiring if guests wanted seconds. They were polite, confident, and proud of their achievement. “This program brought so much to children’s lives,” said Clark, and the truth of that statement was evident at the Family Supper.
Sadly, although we didn’t know it at the time, that Family Supper was the last. On December 16, Clark and Schaff were informed by Hudson Youth Commissioner Daryl Blanks, who was appointed last May, that the program was cancelled. When asked for a reason, Blanks said the Youth Center needed “new programs”—a reason that seems somewhat disingenuous since KINK/YB had been in existence for less than a year and there was a waiting list of kids wanting to be part of it. Fortunately, Blanks agreed to let the program continue until the Family Supper, which the kids had been working toward for weeks, was held, but last week Clark reported that the curtains that she and her volunteers had hung about the area outside the kitchen of the Youth Center, to separate the KINK/YB work and dining area from the unstructured activity going on at the foosball, nok hockey, and pool tables in the rest of the space, had been taken down and all the structure they’d created for the program demolished.
The raised beds, which were intended to be a year-round garden, now stand abandoned, the figures installed there for Winter Walk on December 5 toppled over by the wind. Attempts to enter the garden to tidy up have been thwarted by piles of snow plowed off the parking lot and pushed against the door.
On January 6, Mayor Richard Scalera went public with the news that the Hudson River Bank & Trust Foundation had suspended a grant to the Youth Department, which provided $100,000 annually over a period of five years. As it was reported in the Register-Star, the Foundation was dissatisfied with the level of detail in the reports they were receiving from the City on how the grant money was being used.
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The abandoned garden today |
The grant, which has funded such capital projects as the new skateboard park at Oakdale as well as programs at the Youth Center, is being administered by the Hudson Development Corporation. Kids in the Kitchen/Yoga Buddies has been, since September, one of the programs funded by the HRBT Foundation grant.
In a second article on the issue, which appeared in the Register-Star on January 9, it was revealed that “some instructors” at the Youth Center, among them Clark and Schaff, were being paid $50 an hour. What the article did not make clear was that the compensation was only for the actual time spent with the children and not for time spent in preparation before and cleanup after each session, soliciting participants and contributors to the program, such as Migliorelli Farm, Sundog Solar, and Feather Ridge Farm, or any of the planning and development work necessary to make the program a success. In November, for example, Clark and Schaff got word that Kids in the Kitchen/Yoga Buddies had been awarded a $2,000 grant for food supplies from Price Chopper Supermarkets.
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