The Blaine County Journal News-Opinion - We've Got The County Covered

On November 27, Zurich Elementary School students engaged in a farm to table study and made their own lunch at school. Several curricular-related activities took place on a rotation between 9:00 and 11:00 a.m.

Using materials gathered at the Montana State Literacy Association 2019 Conference: Literacy Colors the Imagination held at Billings West High School in October, Zurich teachers developed a farm to table project for grades K-8. The activities included making butter, making cheese, grinding wheat, and conducting lab activities with yeast. Some of the lesson materials were supplied by the Montana Farm Bureau, a partner in the Montana Farm to School program.

Managed by the Montana Department of Agriculture, Montana Farm to School is a collaboration between the Montana Office of Public Instruction, Montana Team Nutrition Program, Montana State University, and other partners.

The objective of the program is to enrich the connection that communities have with fresh, healthy food and local food producers. By changing food purchasing and education practices at K-12 schools and preschools, students not only gain access to healthy, local foods but also access education opportunities such as school gardens, cooking lessons, and farm field trips. Farm to School empowers children and their families to make informed food choices while strengthening the local economies and contributing to vibrant communities. 40% of Montana school districts surveyed by the USDA say that they participate in farm to school activities.

By reading AG MAG, a publication provided by the American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture, students learned that pizza is the world's most popular food, with Americans eating 350 slices of pizza per second. "As a nation, that means we eat around 100 acres of pizza each day," the magazine stated.

The magazine writers translated that statistic into kid-friendly terms by explaining that an acre is the size of a football field. With that analogy, students determined that Americans eat a lot of pizza!

Pizza talk turned into various math problems with ratios and fractions and other statistics. It also led to conversations about the origin of all of the ingredients and to thoughts about all of the farmers it takes to grow those ingredients, from the wheat that makes the flour to the vegetables and dairy products used for the toppings.

With the guidance of Ms. Cassie Johnson, students in Kindergarten, first, and second grade churned cream into butter and then melted some of that butter for use on the breadsticks that the older students were making.

Under supervision of their teacher, Ms. Heather Brown, the third, fourth, and fifth graders, who had ground the wheat, were in charge of making breadsticks. They also prepared hummus, using chick peas, canola oil, garlic, teamwork, and various other ingredients. For dipping into the hummus, they cut up a variety of vegetables.

Grades six, seven, and eight made cheese, pizza sauce, and a Chickpea Chocolate Cake. Their teacher, Mrs. Colleen Overcast was amazed at what she called the students' "limited cooking knowledge." Some of them, for example, were unaware that yeast is a key agent in helping bread dough to rise.

While conducting the first of their labs on yeast, students used a Geoscope to examine budding yeast. After adding warm water and sugar to yeast, they watched the yeast bud. In the budding process, a bulge forms on the outer edge of the yeast cell as nuclear division takes place. Students were fascinated by the "yeasty beastie's" reproduction process that is so important in brewing and baking.

Students also conducted an experiment that enabled them to see the effects of carbon dioxide gas development, an important enzymatic activity in the dough rising process. In a recycled two-liter pop bottle, students mixed yeast and sugar. Then they added a few inches of water, shook the mixture, and stretched a balloon over the top of the bottle. Over the next 30 minutes, they watched the balloon inflate and learned that yeast, a fungus, is a living organism that has to eat. After it eats, it produces CO2 gas. The bubbles in bread are produced by the CO2 gas from the yeast.

"Besides time and experience in the kitchen, through these activities, we were able to provide a meal and lots of information about food origins and histories, as well as an abundance of agriculture-related and scientific knowledge," Overcast reported. "We even covered social studies with food practices from around the world and math with our measuring and various number operations."

After preparing many of the ingredients for their own lunch on Wednesday, each student at Zurich Elementary assembled a personal pan pizza.

While things were baking, the K-2 students located on a map and reported where all the toppings come from at this time year, identifying the top producing states for their favorite toppings and where they are grown.

The younger students shared facts like these: the top pepperoni and sausage producing states are Iowa, North Carolina, and Minnesota because those meats come from hogs. And the top cheese-producing states are Wisconsin, California, Idaho, and New York since those states raise most of the dairy cattle in the United States.

The third through eighth grade students located various countries on the map and reported on their pizza-topping practices. While it was no surprise that people from around the world love pizza and that United States citizens favor pepperoni to top their pizzas, it was a surprise to learn that people in France predominantly prefer sunny-side up eggs on their pizzas and that Costa Ricans like coconut on their pizza. In Australia, people often put barbecue sauce, emu, kangaroo, and crocodile meat on their pizza pies.

These lessons enhanced the students' knowledge base and gave them a richer understanding of diversity. They learned to look beyond their personal understanding of pizza and to accept that a definition is subject to change with time, place, and individual circumstances. When students hear diversity of thought and experience diverse social practices, they will often recognize that their reality, their understanding, and their experience is not the only one. From that recognition, students begin to look beyond themselves and one way of knowing and believing, to accept alternatives and to develop a respect for difference.

Additionally, the older group of students shared the history of pizza. They explained to the group that the first signs of pizza occurred in A.D. 79 in Pompeii, Italy, where mozzarella cheese was made from the milk of the water buffalo. Furthermore, it wasn't until 1522 that people started putting tomatoes on pizza.

Another fun fact they shared told the story of Queen Margherita of Italy visiting Naples to have pizza made by the famous pizza artisan, Raffaele Esposito. To honor the queen, Esposito topped the pizza with mozzarella, basil, and tomatoes to create the white, green, and red of the Italian flag. The queen so loved the pizza that Chef Esposito name it Pizza Margherita, after the queen-a term we still use for basil topped pizza today.

"The activities were a bunch of fun and helped to get us through the day before Thanksgiving vacation," Overcast said.