How a Chicken Restaurant Saved a Schoolyard Farm from Closing
All photos by Andrea Tejeda.

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Food

How a Chicken Restaurant Saved a Schoolyard Farm from Closing

After losing its funding, the schoolyard farm at Escuela Inglesa Kent in Mexico City was prepared to shut down. But a local restaurant soon came to its aid, proposing a symbiotic relationship between the two.

Twenty years ago, Alice Waters of Chez Panisse spoke to a local newspaper about a decrepit school she passed each day. The director of the school—the Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California—read the interview and asked her to do something to improve it. From that project emerged the famous Edible Schoolyard, where more than 100 varieties of fruits, vegetables, and herbs are grown annually, having served more than 7,000 students in the process. What was once a school that nobody cared about is now a worldwide model for food education.

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Kent garden. All photos by Andrea Tejeda.

Located in the Condesa district of Mexico City, the Escuela Inglesa Kent often goes unnoticed, too. The only thing that draws attention to this block of cement is a canvas sign hanging in the entry that says "Kent Garden." Simplicity is their thing.

Eager to find out if this was Mexico's version of the Edible Schoolyard, I did some research.

Helga Caballero is a thirtysomething woman with a full head of curls and an easy smile. Her eyes shine when you ask her about anything related to nature. She's a biologist with a master's in ecology, and after only three years teaching at the school, she's overhauled the boring environmental education class and turned it into the school's Taylor Swift.

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I meet her during her free half hour so that she can show me her school farm. It's recess time and we're not even halfway across the schoolyard before kids from all ages stop her to ask questions, talk to her about their dog's latest trick, or tell her a new fact about penguins. It's like watching a political candidate walking among their supporters.

"The purpose of the farm is to let kids experience an immediate relationship with the ecosystem, that they learn the difference between organic and industrialized products and that they understand, in time and in practice, what cross-pollination is," says Caballero.

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But since nothing is free in life, they had to search for funding and manpower to set everything in motion. She got the help of Naturalia (an organization that promotes the conservation of ecosystems and wildlife species in Mexico) and the Disney Channel, which funded the project and provided volunteers. Huerto Romita provided all the seeds.

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What was previously a grey terrace with a few water tanks and street cats became a classroom farm with six 880-pound growing beds. The kids recycled water tanks and turned them into worm compost bins; they made organic pesticides with tobacco, onions, and chile infusions; they learned the importance of cross-pollination and the symbiotic relationship that must exist between insects and where food grows.

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Everything was going so well that Disney Channel started to make TV clips starring the farmer kids, while their parents were eating the produce that their kids had grown. The goal was close.

Until they ran out of money.

Months passed by until a solution arrived—from the neighbors across the street. One of the owners of Bretón Rosticeros, a neighborhood rotisserie near the school, was intrigued by the farm and knocked on their door.

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Alonso Ruvalcaba, one of the restaurant's owners, always wears a black jacket, sneakers, and glasses. He is also one of Mexico's most important food critics, and his eyes shine bright if you talk to him about fried chicken.

"As it usually happens, we came by not for a specific reason, but for a series of vague reasons," says Ruvalcaba. "Before I knocked on their door for the first time, I saw a restaurant sign in Polanco —I think it was a Greek tavern —that said 'NEIGHBORS, DO NOT VISIT THIS RESTAURANT, IT IS ILLEGAL.' I thought it was a sad and terrible thing. On the other hand, in between all of Bretón's comment cards there was one—my favorite of all time—that said: 'You are the best neighbors we've ever had'. Those two things combined might be a good reason for why we went to Kent."

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Ruvalcaba went to the school with two purposes: to befriend them as "an act of good will," and to find a way for his restaurant to have its own farm. There are many examples of restaurants that do this, from Diego Hernández and his Corazón de Tierra in Ensenada, to chef Eneko Atxa of the three-Michelin-starred Azurmendi, which won The World's 50 Best Restaurants "Sustainable Restaurant of 2014" award.

So, to kill two birds with one stone, Ruvalcaba and Caballero made an agreement: Bretón would donate all of the funds required to restore the farm, and the school would grow and provide the ingredients that the restaurant needed for its menu.

So the farm grew back to life.

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The kids, who attend from kindergarten to the first year of high school, are the ones in charge of growing, watering, and taking care of two dozen varieties of herbs, flowers, and vegetables.

Caballero shows me the crops used for Bretón. "Here is the cilantro for the gorditas; pansy and Indian cress flowers; chives, chards, and lettuces for salads; herbs, mint, rosemary, and thyme for pasta."

"The purpose is for kids to have a clear idea of a vegetable's lifespan: from being a seed to growing, preparing it for production, being cooked, and then eaten," says Ruvalcaba. "It's a very practical lesson, and also a responsible thing."

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Caballero agrees with the food critic. She thinks it's important that kids realize where food comes from, so "that way they will learn to respect farmers, because they know all the hard work that making stuff grow takes."

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Thanks to the farm, Bretón's team has changed its way of thinking about the available produce. Instead of asking themselves if what they have is enough, they ask, "What can we make with what we have?" Accordingly, they plan their crops in a more careful way. Their long-term plan is to progressively get out of the traditional provision system so that they can depend on the farm entirely.

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Regarding Caballero, she's going all in; she wants the kids to cook everything they grow in the farm in their kitchens. "I believe that the cycle will not be complete until they eat what they have just cut. Beyond teaching them a subject, I'm interested in them noticing that what they do in the farm can have an effect on the outside," she says.

I would've loved to have a teacher like her.

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All photos by Andrea Tejeda.

This article was originally published in Spanish on MUNCHIES ES.