PORTLAND, Ore. – Butternut squash isn’t just sweet, delicious and packed with vitamins. Its genes carry the story of Indigenous farmers who began cultivating squash thousands of years ago.
During the 2022-23 school year, Oregon State University Extension Service’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education (SNAP-Ed) team piloted three lesson plans that teach elementary school students about the cultural significance of three healthy foods – squash, greens, and corn – to Indigenous Americans, families across the African diaspora, and Latin Americans.
The educators partnered with the cultural workgroups that originated in SNAP-Ed and Portland Public Schools to pair these lessons with dishes for children to taste.
The nutrition educators’ goal is that one day, Oregon students from many different backgrounds will be able to learn that healthy foods come in many shapes and flavors – including flavors their families know and love.
Joanne Lyford and Rebecca Marson, the leaders of this effort, are nutrition educators in Portland.
For more than 30 years, OSU Extension has overseen Oregon’s state SNAP-Ed efforts through grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Through the program, SNAP-Ed staff and partners in all 36 Oregon counties offer cooking lessons to low-income Oregonians and distribute educational materials to people receiving SNAP food assistance funds.
Food Hero, OSU Extension’s SNAP-Ed's social-marketing initiative, publishes a monthly print newsletter devoted to healthy cooking and physical activity. It also creates content for social media and YouTube.
In 2019, Food Hero connected with the OSU SNAP-Ed/Extension cultural workgroups to ensure that SNAP-Ed’s recipes reflect Oregon's many different cultural communities. Meilana Charles, a former outreach coordinator in Extension’s Family and Community Health Program, coordinated the African Heritage Cultural Workgroup before recently taking another position at OSU. The group, Charles said, brings together OSU faculty, SNAP-Ed staff, and community members to propose recipes and develop culturally respectful health messages.
“The African diaspora has a rich tradition of using foods and spices to create delicious dishes that primarily originate in Africa and are adapted to the region of one’s more recent history,” Charles said. “Our goal is to capture that diversity.”
Joining with Portland Public Schools
In spring 2022, staff at the Portland Public Schools’ health team learned of SNAP-Ed’s work to enhance its cultural responsiveness, which dovetailed with its own efforts to do the same. District-wide, 32.9% of PPS students are from historically underserved groups, and the district is the most diverse in the state.
The district invited Lyford and Marson to review its nutrition curricula from kindergarten through eighth grade. Marson concluded that the existing lessons didn’t reflect the cultural diversity and lived experiences of young Portlanders.
She asked herself how she could adapt Food Hero’s cultural toolkits for classrooms.
“Teachers already have so much on their plates that it wouldn’t be helpful to throw resources at them and ask them to figure out how to use them,” Marson said. “We needed to develop culturally respectful and inclusive lesson plans aligned to Oregon’s educational standards.”
Marson asked the Indigenous Peoples, African Heritage and Latin Heritage workgroups to help her craft the lessons.
Charles, whose background is in education, said, “My lens for providing feedback was grounded in the question, ‘What would a child from the African diaspora want to know about greens?’ Greens are something they’ve likely been exposed to, so I was drawn to what would be a child’s sensory experience with greens.”
Together, Extension nutrition educators and the workgroups created three multimedia lesson plans tailored to grades K-2 and grades 3-5.
Each plan, which centered around one healthy ingredient, included a script to guide the discussion, visual slides and activity handouts, such as an illustration of squash plants for children to color in while naming the different parts of the plant.
Talking to kids about squash, greens or corn means so much more than teaching them how the plants are grown, Marson said.
“History, social science, health education and culture are all woven into one lesson,” she said.
“Children understand food and its historical importance,” said Danita Macy, coordinator of the Indigenous Peoples Cultural Workgroup. “We shouldn't ever dumb down education because we're worried about our kids being affected by it.”
Cooking up the lessons
In the spring of 2022, Marson approached Whitney Ellersick, senior director for nutrition services at Portland Public Schools, to share SNAP-Ed's plans.
“We started to toy with the idea of having SNAP-Ed assist with new menu options or other local food options that may be less familiar to students,” Ellersick said.
They agreed to collaborate on a dish that honored Indigenous foodways. The Indigenous Peoples Cultural Workgroup selected a recipe for harissa-roasted butternut squash that Chef Nephi Craig, who is White Mountain Apache and Diné, had created for Food Hero.
Over a six-month period, Ellersick worked closely with Marson and the workgroup to adapt the recipe. It didn’t just have to meet federal school-nutrition standards. The staff and equipment at PPS's 87 on-site kitchens had to be able to prepare the dish in culturally respectful ways.
Ellersick also had to secure enough butternut squash from Hilltop Produce Farms in Troutdale through local distributor Pacific Coast Fresh Company.
From squash to greens and corn
On Nov. 17, 2022, elementary school teachers all over Portland taught their classes how Indigenous farmers shared the seeds for squash across North and South America. Then the children headed down to the cafeteria to taste it. In fact, nearly 18,000 students, from kindergarten to high school, had a chance that day to eat harissa-roasted butternut squash.
After guided tastings that SNAP-Ed staff led with students at Faubion School and Woodlawn Elementary, 25% of the children said they liked the flavor of squash, and 38% said they might like it.
“We got a lot of great feedback from the educators that it was wonderful to do a lesson and then see it in the cafeteria, something that the students can experience and see firsthand,” Ellersick said.
Several months later, Marson and the African Heritage Workgroup released a second lesson plan devoted to African heritage greens. Teachers taught students to identify different varieties of greens, and the classrooms discussed the importance of cooking with love in African diasporic homes.
To accompany this effort, SNAP-Ed put together 72 teacher kits that included spinach seeds, which they sent to teachers in 22 different cities.
In May 2023, Ellersick tapped an existing purveyor, Lucy De Leon, to coordinate a meal around corn and Latin Heritage foods. De Leon and her parents own Salsas Locas, a Portland-based tortilla maker, which has supplied tamales to the district for several years.
In addition to a much-loved chile-and-cheese tamale, Salsas Locas made a new variety (chicken with chile-infused masa) to serve Portland students in late May. At the same time, Marson and the Latin Heritage Workgroup created a lesson plan around corn.
Sharing the lessons across Oregon
SNAP-Ed staff are now reviewing evaluations and peer reviews to refine all three lesson plans.
"We don't use the four-letter word ‘done,’” Lyford joked.
Marson hopes that one day, elementary school teachers across Oregon will be able to use these lessons to teach their students about culturally respectful foodways.
Staff from both SNAP-Ed and Portland Public Schools hope to repeat the three lessons – accompanied by school meals – in Portland on a regular basis.
“We want to see the cafeteria and the kitchen as learning spaces, not as something separate from the rest of the school,” Ellersick says. “By making the lessons that OSU Extension has created in partnership with our nutrition education side of the house, we're helping to bridge that gap.”
