A Delicious Summer with FoodPrints & Looking Ahead to a New School Year
A Summer of Full of Fresh Fruits & Veggies
This summer, the FoodPrints Summer Program provided hands-on cooking and gardening to 150 students at three DCPS sites: Takoma, Langley, and Houston Elementary Schools. Every afternoon, students cooked and ate FoodPrints recipes and explored the school garden.
One highlight was a sensory exploration of peppers: students touched, smelled, and tasted a variety of sweet peppers before chopping them for a vibrant, veggie-packed fried rice dish. “This fried rice tastes like something from my home country I really like,” one student shared. “I could eat the whole bowl!!”
To bring the experience home, we distributed Veggie Fried Rice Recipe kits with pantry items, fresh produce, and printed recipes at Takoma, and Pico de Gallo kits at Langley, complete with a cutting board and kid-safe knife.
Across all three sites, students cooked more than 60 recipes using fresh summer produce from local farms and their school gardens. One afternoon, a student watering the garden asked to taste kale he spotted in a raised bed. After one bite, he exclaimed, “It’s SO good!” which sparked a kale-tasting chain reaction among classmates who all came running over to taste the kale, too. As one Houston student summed it up: “FoodPrints is the best part of the day!”
Looking Ahead:
With summer behind us, our 30 FoodPrints teachers are ready to lead more than 2,000 sessions this coming school year for 8,000 DC students. FoodPrints lessons will connect learning in the kitchen and garden to topics like photosynthesis, food justice, seasonal growing, and measurement. Students will prepare and enjoy over 30,000 pounds of fresh, local produce sourced by FRESHFARM’s Pop-Up Food Hub — and families will be invited to join the fun.
Stay tuned — we can’t wait to share stories from the school year ahead!
