Pupils find food for thought at farmers market

BREWER – At the beginning of the school year, some kindergarten pupils in Joyce Mallery’s class at the Earl C. McGraw School thought food purchased in stores “dropped out of the sky.”

For months, the 5- and 6-year-olds have learned that vegetables and meat are grown or raised and other food items are prepared or created.

The kindergarten pupils and first-graders from McGraw and others from Leroy H. Smith School in Winterport on Wednesday saw firsthand the origins of some foods at the Brewer Farmers Market.

“Even though we live in a rural community, where there are working farms, there are a lot of questions, like how does a loaf of bread arrive at our grocery store,” Mallery said while pupils in her class were planting beans in small waxed cups filled with dirt.

A total of 36 pupils from Hampden and another 14 from Winterport were exposed to fresh herbs, freshly baked bread, and could be seen smelling flowers and patting two young goats visiting from Garden Lore in Mariaville.

The youngsters and their teachers tasted blueberry and strawberry jam, two types of chevres or goat cheese, and freshly made bread and cookies during Children’s Education Day, sponsored by the farmers market and Healthy Maine Partnerships.

The pupils also planted beans with Joyce Benson, owner of Village Green Organic Produce in Troy, and used their noses to smell herbs brought in by Carol Varin of Beddington Ridge Farm in Beddington.

Varin handed around chives, which one of the pupils called “onion grass,” sage, sweet cicely, catnip and other herbs.

Winterport resident Bobby Dudley, 6, put his catnip in his pocket.

“Chestnut would go crazy,” he said of his cat.

Each of the children also climbed onto a big red antique tractor, built in the late 1920s, from Heald Farm of Troy, which has produced corn for more than 100 years.

“This was the first tractor made to replace a horse,” Mark Rollins told the pupils. “Before this, they used horses.”

Rollins works the farm along with his father, Paul Jones, and his uncle, veteran farmer Reginald Heald.

In addition to learning about the origins of food, the pupils also were educated about television advertising during their studies.

Cynthia Breare, who teaches kindergarten, first and second grade at the Smith school, said the pupils learned “why they have fast-food ads and why they don’t advertise for apples.”

“It gives them a different eye,” she said, “and provides an “awareness of what they put into their bodies.”

Some of the youngsters have influenced what is served at home, Mallery said.

Some parents have told her, “I’ve had to change my shopping – the kids want wheat bread,” she recalled.

Sunny Acres Farm in Levant provided the bread and cookies, and Porter’s Farm and Greenhouse in Lincoln had flowers on hand for the pupils to smell and provided a flower for each to take home and plant.