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The school kitchen garden is an innovative curricular program based on school children planting a garden and then learning to cook with the foods they grow. The program teaches students many life skills, along with teaching them about nutrition, the environment, sustainability, and almost every school subject. Researchers have studied various aspects of school kitchen gardens, but few have focused on kitchen gardens' influence on students' nutritional habits, environmental knowledge, and sustainability practices in particular, like this study does. The popularity of the kitchen garden program in Australia is mostly due to the celebrity chef Stephanie Alexander, who started a foundation that does everything from fund to provide curricular support to primary schools wanting to start a kitchen garden. This report examines two kitchen gardens in schools in the Northern Rivers Region of New South Wales, Australia-Tuntable Creek Public School and Main Arm Upper Public School.
About the author
Jeff Meltzer is a graduate of Environmental Policy from Colby College and an alum of the School for International Training's Australia: Sustainability and Environmental Action study abroad program.
