Feeding the Future

“We had created a beautiful garden at the school, but to our dismay, the students were not interested in eating anything that grew there, especially vegetables,” says parent volunteer Ann Colleary, who, with her husband Lou

Rodarte, still volunteers at the Scottsdale school.
The very first “Chef in the Garden” demonstration 12 years ago was presented to a class of second-graders. Badman and fellow chef Sasha Levine helped the students pick herbs from the garden, as well as lemon verbena used to make a lemon panna cotta. The students were delighted.

In fact, the demonstration was such a hit that Badman returned to Echo Canyon four times that year. After that, Colleary and Rodarte took over scheduling the demonstrations for the future.

After seeing Badman’s (who is known as the “veggie whisperer”) presentations, they were inspired to make sure as many students as possible had an opportunity to learn from her.

Badman continued over the next several years with “Chef in the Garden” presentations. The school remodeled so that all the classrooms were adjacent to a garden. Today, the school has 26 vegetable and fruit garden areas. 

“It’s essentially a school situated in a botanical garden,” says Rodarte, who is a master gardener specializing in school gardens in Arizona. Besides growing gardens, he educates teachers about using gardens to enhance hands-on curriculum. In 2015, Badman was invited to a James Beard Foundation “chef boot camp” in Vermont.

“Chefs were invited from all over the U.S. to learn to be better advocates for childhood nutrition,” she says. “I left that program feeling very motivated to help more kids appreciate how delicious healthy food can be.”

Badman knew she wanted to expand “Chef in the Garden” to more schools, so she recruited about 19 other chefs in the Valley and invited the vice president of advocacy from the James Beard Foundation to educate them about school meal policy in Arizona. It was a friend of Badman’s who suggested the name Blue Watermelon Project for the formal outreach to more schools.

The project is supported by the Steele Foundation, a Phoenix-based grant-making organization committed to traditional and cultural educational programs, and is supported by Sprouts Healthy Communities Foundation. Administrators at schools began to hear about the program and before Badman and her team knew it, they were reviewing applications from schools. “We look for a lot of diversity among the schools selected,” she says.

As of this fall, Blue Watermelon Project will present “Chef in the Garden” in 22 elementary and middle schools in the Phoenix area and at two in Tucson. In addition to Echo Canyon, schools include Encanto, Longview, and Rover elementary schools and Concordia Charter School.