Photograph by Richard A. Nichols
Mildred Mattfeldt-Beman, chair of nutrition and dietetics at Saint Louis University, knew 11 years ago that she had to do something. Her students were teaching kids in city schools and groaning at what passed for nutrition. But back in their own classroom, they didn’t even know the names of some foods, and nobody seemed to know how to make healthy food taste good.
“Chefs would tell us, ‘You might know health, but you don’t know cooking,’” Mattfeldt-Beman recalls. “Well, that’s because they couldn’t cook without butter and cream!” She knew it was possible for healthy food to please the senses and be fair and responsible and humane. So in 1998, she decided to thread information about sustainable food systems through the department’s entire curriculum, and in 2001, she integrated culinary arts. SLU was now one of only two programs in the nation educating nutrition experts who were also chefs.
The following year, faculty and students teamed up with midtown schools, professional chefs, and area farmers in a program called the Gardens to Tables Consortium. “Vegetables do not grow in the produce aisle,” Mattfeldt-Beman had announced crisply. So the university gave her three-quarters of an acre, fenced it, and promised to mow it and pay the water bill. Her department raised $8,000 to get the water to the site, Missouri Botanical Garden donated gardening materials and hand tools, and SLU students built raised beds. Soon Mattfeldt-Beman’s three sons would be tearing up concrete in a SLU alley to add an herb garden.
At first, kids were brought to the garden by bus so they could plant, weed, and harvest the lettuces, sugar snap peas, kohlrabi, beets, carrots, onions, radishes, and spinach. Their names were on their plots, and they practiced math by calculating each plot’s yield and learned to measure by harvesting the broccoli when it reached 6 inches. In May, the harvest was brought back to the school, and everybody ate triumphant hand-grown salads and took veggies home to their parents.
In 2002, when Mattfeldt-Beman won a national award for creativity from the American Dietetic Association, she brushed off the laurel leaves: “What kid doesn’t like to play in the dirt with bugs and worms?” But by 2004, Gardens to Tables had won a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Now gardens could be built at the schools, latchkey programs created so students could garden after school. They’d also help grow and prepare food for the Campus Kitchen program, which delivered food to people with low incomes or special needs. They’d learn how junk food junked up their bodies, courtesy of experts at SLU’s med school. And soon they’d have a grant from the General Mills Foundation to do after-school lessons and cooking tutorials, after which students would each bring home a sack of ingredients and repeat their triumph for their families.
By now, they knew enough to teach their parents why food mattered.
“Your heart should be about the size of your fist,” Ray Vollmer says, pulling a pale, pinky-brown heart from the cooler.
“Oooooh!” a girl from L’Ouverture Accelerated Middle School shrieks, and a boy mutters an awed “Oh. My. God.”
“The way you destroy a heart is to make it work harder than it’s supposed to,” continues Vollmer, coordinator of the Adventures In Medicine and Science program SLU uses to teach area kids about health and disease. “Anybody know what the heart’s made of?”
“Skin?”
“Nope, good guess. Muscle tissue. When you clog your arteries up, your heart’s gotta work against all these narrow arteries full of French fries, so the muscle gets bigger and bigger, until—”
He pulls out a heart that’s the size of a Yorkshire terrier.
“Eeeew!” Every kid at the table rears back instinctively.
“That how that guy died?” a boy asks, recovering.
Vollmer shows them a clogged artery. “See that white stuff? It feels like scabs on your skin,” he says. “If you can’t see,
come closer.”
Next he shows them a nice, clean, healthy heart. “Compare it to this one,” he says, retrieving the enlarged heart. “You could put a baseball inside the big one.”
“A baseball glove!” one of the boys shoots back.
Finally, Vollmer pulls out a heart that suffered an attack. “See this vessel, like a little worm on the surface? It’s carrying blood to the heart muscle. If it gets clogged up, everything below dies. See the pale area that’s sunken in? That’s dead muscle.”
One of the nutrition grad students takes over, holding up test tubes to show the kids how much yellowish fat is in ice cream, or a Hershey bar with nuts, and how little is in frozen yogurt or pretzels.
“How’d you get all that fat in there?” a girl asks.
“Er…we buy these, for teaching.”
The boys are still whispering about the hearts. “I thought I was going to get sick,” one hisses. It’s a relief to stand up and start the afternoon cooking class; soon he’s tenderly slicing a tomato. “Drizzle it with the drizzle!” one of the girls urges her cooking partner, who’s humming as she cuts parsley very fine.
They’re making baked fish. Baked. Not fried.
On August 13, 2004, the Chartwells food service abruptly left the SLU medical-center campus. On August 14, 2004, Mattfeldt-Beman lugged in crocks of homemade soup. The next week, exhausted, she called an old friend. She wanted to create a café, Fresh Gatherings, serving healthy food made of locally grown, sustainable ingredients. But she needed help.
Eddie Neill, who’s been partner and chef for Café Provencal, Chez Leon, Malmaison, The Dubliner, and now Wm. Shakespeare’s Gastropub, promised Mattfeldt-Beman a year of his time—and stayed almost two.
“Midlife crisis or whatever,” he says now, shrugging. “It was fun.” A SLU alum with a degree in urban affairs, he cared as much about sustainability, social justice, slow food, and humane methods as Mattfeldt-Beman did. The trick was convincing the med-school students, staff, and faculty.
At the start of the year, the top seller was grilled cheese. By spring, people were eating lamb patties and eggplant stacks with chèvre and rosemary.
“Not using a fryer, that was the biggest thing,” he recalls. “The kid who was the biggest pain in my butt kept saying, ‘You have any real meat today? How about some fries?’ Then he came back from break with a real strange look on his face and said, ‘Can I shake your hand?’ He’d just found out he was diabetic. He said, ‘How can I change my eating habits?’ I said, ‘You get away from the stuff, it won’t be that hard. If we started earlier, kids wouldn’t have this problem.’”
Neill once asked someone at a local school district how many kids it had. “With the rate of diabetes at, let’s say, 30 percent, how many will be affected?” he continued. “Is that $60,000 you get from Coca-Cola worth 600 kids becoming diabetic?”
Neill helped the SLU students learn to work with whatever was fresh. When a local farmer brought in 300 pounds of green tomatoes, Neill and one of the students made green-tomato ketchup and sold it at the Clayton Farmer’s Market.
Now all sorts of things go to the Farmer’s Market: herbs grown on campus, produce from the schoolkids’ gardens, bread baked in the café. Fresh Gatherings holds cooking classes, educates, develops recipes, buys locally. Grad students visit the farms to make sure they’re using sustainable practices: avoiding pesticides and pollutants, treating animals humanely, diversifying, rotating crops, maximizing flavor and shelf life without artifice. “We don’t necessarily look for organic certification, because you have to pay the feds for that, and much of its meaning has been usurped by big business anyway,” Mattfeldt-Beman adds. “But our plates and silverware are made from limestone and potato starch; cups and paper goods are corn-based; everything composts.”
Phillis Troupe and Candice Murdock, students at Central Catholic St. Nicholas School and Academy, are helping volunteer Joan Kiburz make Iggy dog bones. Named for the SLU president’s golden retriever, who was named in honor of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the healthy cookie-bones take the shape of everything a dog dreams about chasing. “Squirrel, rabbit, cat, bone,” Kiburz recites as she cuts out the treats, which she sells at the Farmer’s Market, along with Jebby Java and SLU Brew fair-trade coffee, to help support Gardens to Tables.
Troupe and Murdock wrote such amazing essays, they won scholarships to SLU’s summer camp, a solid week of classes on healthy cooking. Troupe, who wants to be a lawyer, cooks for her six brothers and sisters and sometimes for kids they baby-sit. “I’m not a ramen-noodle person,” she says with Jane Austen dignity. “I make baked potatoes and baked chicken. There’s this one baked fish my mom and I make, it’s lemon-flavored.” Murdock wants to be a psychologist but also “the next great Bobby Flay,” throwing down new recipes with seasonal, local foods. She shakes her head ruefully. “There are a lot of people who don’t seem as healthy as they should be.”
This spring, Kiburz helped orchestrate a recipe book, Making It, extracting slow-food recipes from top St. Louis chefs and restaurants. The book highlights—and its proceeds benefit—Gardens to Tables.
Mattfeldt-Beman is also teaching a new, in-depth course in “Sustainable Food Systems” this spring. And in her spare time, she’s working with the Maplewood Richmond Heights School District to open a processing center for locally grown food. “We chose them because they have kitchens, personnel we can train, and existing menus that are already healthy,” she explains. (Most schools don’t even have kitchens anymore; federal money for maintaining them dried up in the 1980s, so food-service companies bring in the meals.)
SLU is offering the old Incarnate Word Hospital kitchen as a processing center—and one more opportunity for students to learn as they serve. Fresh tomato sauces, sun-dried tomatoes, dried apple chips—all will be made “on the school district’s budget but with fair-market prices for the farmers,” Mattfeldt-Beman says, “so if the district’s a little short, we’ll pick up the difference.”
Her next project is to amend SLU’s garden for kids with disabilities, constructing vertical beds, teepees, hanging gardens, and a pagoda of beds on pulleys that kids using wheelchairs can raise and lower. Blueprints include a waterfall in the center, a swing and hammock for the repetitive motion that soothes kids with autism, and high-traction paths wide enough for two wheelchairs, “because little kids like to go together.”
Gardening adapts beautifully to anybody’s needs, with a little imagination—and fertile soil. Mattfeldt-Beman’s now writing a grant to put in a composting plant with vermiculture, so she can press even earthworms into community service.
Food does more than sustain us. “It can take you back in time, remind you of happiness, create an environment, celebrate an occasion,” she says. “And it has huge cultural implications—which is probably why it’s so difficult to change people’s palates! It took the SLU faculty months to stop begging for French fries!”
Her advice, should anyone ask? “Slow down and enjoy the food you are eating. Be aware of the impact your choices have on others. When you choose fair-trade coffee, you are choosing to support a group of people so they can make a just wage. When you buy from a farmer using sustainable practices, you are choosing to support the earth.
“Choose wisely.”
Jeannette Cooperman, the magazine’s staff writer, got inspired and planted herself a great big vegetable garden after reporting this story.
