Midwest Food Connection (MFC) is Seward Co-op’s presence in local elementary schools (alongside four other Twin Cities food co-ops). A small staff of talented educators visits classrooms to provide a series of four seasonally appropriate lessons: culinary and garden adventures. Lessons feature cooking and tasting local food picked up from the co-op, the cultural and historical context of familiar foods, and nutrition education. During the fall and spring, MFC educators teach students in school gardens and bring them on field trips to local farms. Your co-op ownership helps to support this important outreach work.

In the 2015–16 school year, MFC’s educators taught 1,000 lessons in more than 50 schools. We are expanding our school garden teaching, continuing farm field trips, exploring new collaborations through our recently developed middle school curriculum, and making connections to food served in Minneapolis Public Schools cafeterias.

This year, Midwest Food Connection is celebrating our 20th anniversary. As part of our 20th anniversary celebration, we will be offering special classes at Seward Co-op this fall, we’ll have a presence at Seward’s annual meeting, and we’ll be holding a donor drive in November. For more information about our program and how you can support Midwest Food Connection today, visit our website at midwestfoodconnection.org.

A Personal Story

As adults with diversified palates, we can sometimes take for granted that trying a new food — even one as seemingly innocuous as a purple carrot or a piece of dried mango — can be an intimidating feat for a first grader tasting it for the first time. Maybe it’s an evolutionary tactic for kids to be wary of unfamiliar foods.

That’s why in the lessons I teach for MFC, I invite kids to join the “twobite club.” The first bite might be shocking to their taste buds as they experience unfamiliar flavors and textures. I encourage students to take a second bite to let their mouth get accustomed to the new food before making up their minds about whether or not they like it.

I am consistently impressed by the number of “thumbs up” I see when we vote with our thumbs, especially when tasting more grown-up foods like our winter vegetable stew with leeks, kale, and rutabaga — three vegetables that on their own might be met with strange looks from a class of kindergarteners, if not outright shows of skepticism or distaste. It might help that, as part of our lesson on winter vegetables, the kindergarteners have been transported to another time… 100 years ago, when most people didn’t have refrigerators in their homes and stored much of their harvest in their root cellars. Kindergarteners take turns pantomiming walking down the stairs to the root cellar to fetch vegetables for our stew, and the anticipation of eating builds as I finish cooking, posing as an old-fashioned mom making lunch for her kids.

One teacher who is a long-time partner of ours described MFC lessons as “culinary adventures” for the classroom. Through the magical, transformative act of cooking, we transport kids to another time, place or flavor experience.

MFC lessons are a unique culinary experience for kids and a valuable service for teachers who want to include lessons about food, nutrition and agriculture in their classrooms but may not have the time, resources or knowledge to prepare them.