Walking past lockers, classrooms and basketball courts at John O’Connell High School, the school garden, albeit unassuming, is filled with life: Green onions, cilantro, carrots and wildflowers.
Since 2019, in a two-hour session each week, students at John O’Connell, Mission High School and the Academy at McAteer, have been paid to work in the garden, kitchen and the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market. In the past two months, they have learned to make chocolate-chip cookies and lemon bars, using some ingredients they’ve grown in the school garden.
On Tuesday, about 10 students harvested veggies and herbs for a recipe they were about to make: A Korean veggie pancake, a new attempt for all of them.
One boy picking green onions learned that, if picked from the bottom, the green onions will keep growing back. “It’s indefinite!” he exclaims, eyes wide. Another was pruning a thorny blackberry bramble off the soil, to keep it from spreading all over the beds.
Students showed this reporter sunflowers they planted four weeks ago, which have already sprouted and created a patch of green in the plant beds.
The warm and sunny days in the Mission are perfect for the gardens. “If you plant anything there, it just takes off,” said Naomi Webb, the teens education coordinator and instructor of the program at Foodwise, the organizer of the Mission Community Market and Ferry Plaza Farmers Market.
At one point, students were distracted by the nasturtiums, orange flowers in the garden planted by students before them. After learning that the flowers are edible and have a peppery flavor, three of them tasted, to test if they’re actually spicy. They are.
“I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about nature, untouched by men … It just touches me,” said Aaron-Ismael, one of the students trying the flowers.
Walking back to the O’Connell High kitchen, holding green onions, carrots and giant leaves of rainbow chard, the students washed their hands and got ready to cook. They split into two groups: Some chopped vegetables into match-size sticks; their knife skills are somewhat clumsy, but they got the job done. The others prepared the pancake batter and sauce.
Ruby, a student at the program, mixed the sauce. For her, the kitchen is a familiar place.
“It’s a big thing to cook in my family. We are from Honduras, and everyone loves cooking,” Ruby said.
Since she was 5, Ruby has been helping her mom in the kitchen, chopping, mixing ingredients together and cleaning up. They make baleadas — big tortillas filled with beans, cheese and “basically anything else” — for Christmas and other occasions in the family.
“I learn the traditional stuff at home from my mom,” Ruby said. “Here, I have a teacher to get me out of the comfort zone of our traditional food.”
Next to Ruby, Lineth and Hilda fiddled with cups and tablespoons and mixed the pancake batter together. They have spent less time in the kitchen at home, other than “whipping out whatever I can feed on.”
Lineth, who has participated in the program for parts of two years, invited Hilda to join this spring. For them, the cooking sometimes takes a backseat to who they are cooking with.
“You spend the extra two hours together and cook together,” Lineth said, as she and Hilda shared two cups of ice cubes with red pepper flakes. “That brings us closer.”
Lineth and Hilda, unlike Aaron-Ismael, have not yet discovered the charm of gardening; they don’t like to get dirty. But Aaron-Ismael agrees on the bonding element.
“The social played a big role in it,” he said. “Otherwise, I’ll just be cooking by myself. The company helps.”
There were random conversations: “Have you tried fried Oreos? It’s like chocolate fudge at the end of the day.” Since they were making pancakes, an infamous hard-to-flip kind of food, there were plenty of flipping failures, too. Some life lessons snuck in those failures as well: “Fake it till you make it, you know?”
The pancakes turned out great, though this may be beyond the point. Webb, the instructor, put the pancakes in a circle around the sauce, like a $16.99 dish from a Korean restaurant. With cilantro and flowers from the garden, the students garnished the plate, particular about the positioning of the herbs.
“This is ‘fairy food,’ that’s the name of the dish,” Aaron-Ismael said.
Around 6:20 p.m., as everyone trickled out of the kitchen, three students shared a canister of whipped cream before they left. “It’s extra creamy,” one of them emphasizes. They laughed, and walked out of the school kitchen together.