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Jobs We Love: Donna Cavato, founding director of the Edible Schoolyard New Orleans

by JBF Editors

Educating, feeding, and nourishing over 700 students, the Edible Schoolyard New Orleans affiliate is now in its fourth year. We talked with founding director Donna Cavato about the birth of the program and the future of school lunch.

James Beard Foundation: What’s your job description?

Donna Cavato: The mission of Edible Schoolyard NOLA is to change the way our kids eat, learn, and live. We do this by integrating organic gardening and seasonal cooking into the curriculum, culture, and food programs of the Samuel J. Green Charter School in New Orleans.

I was hired in August 2006 to spearhead the development and implementation of the program here. In the first year I was responsible for working with the school community to design and develop our garden: we took a blighted public school campus that had been filled with several feet of Katrina floodwaters and transformed it into a verdant, one third–acre organic space. It’s a hands-on teaching garden where students in grades kindergarten through eight learn how to grow their own food, which also reinforces lessons in science, math, and language arts.

Next we raised funds for our kitchen project, which is called A Place at the Table for Every Child. We built a hands-on kitchen and remodeled our commercial cafeteria kitchen. This is now where students learn how to prepare and enjoy the fruits of their labor from our garden.

Now I am overseeing curriculum development of our garden lessons, and also working on citywide school cafeteria policy issues.

JBF: What past experiences have prepared you for your job? Do you have a background in gardening or nutrition?

DC: Many, if not all, of my previous experiences have prepared me for this work. I’ve lived in and loved New Orleans for ten years. Growing up in an Italian family, food was and is the center of everything: growing it, preparing it, and most importantly, enjoying it together. My education background is in Urban Planning and Public Policy, and I have over 17 years experience in non-profit management and leadership.

On the gardening and cooking side, I’ve been gardening since I was very young, at the foot of my father, who loved to grow vegetables, fruits, and flowers. I’ve also worked as a professional cook for many years as a means to pay for college, where I met my husband (who is a local New Orleans chef!) of 16 years.

JBF: What’s a typical day like for you?

DC: I don’t think I’ve ever had a typical day at the Edible Schoolyard! Each day is full of promise and new opportunities. I’m working in a very unique public school that I love. The mornings begin working with students who arrive between 6:30 A.M. and 6:45 A.M. to help set up for breakfast service for the whole school. We call our cafeteria the Green Café. The kids wash and set tables, sort silverware (no Styrofoam or sporks for us anymore!), and put water pitchers and flowers out on the tables. The rest of the day is filled with fundraising and community outreach work, supporting garden and kitchen staff, and working on our longer term goals of citywide and statewide cafeteria reform.

JBF: What's the most exciting part of your job? What do you like least?

DC: The most exciting part of my job is being part of a community and providing opportunities for our kids to be engaged and exposed to the wonderful world of food. I never tire of seeing a kindergartener pick up a worm for the first time, or to see a child dig up the first potato or peanut that they grew. Our fifth graders go to the L’Hoste Citrus—the state’s largest organic citrus grove— every year as part of their grade level experience. We also just had a schoolwide citrus tasting, where we tasted seven different kinds of organic, local citrus!

What I like least is the ongoing responsibility of fundraising. To be secure with funding would allow us to focus exclusively on program quality, and creating “Edible Education” opportunities for more children.

JBF: How do you see your job and career evolving over the next five years?

DC: I like to believe that locally, and nationally, we are on the cusp of extraordinary change in the way we feed our children (and ourselves), particularly in school environments. We have a tremendous opportunity to galvanize a movement through schools nationally—public and private—to change what and how we eat. In doing so, we not only change our food, but ourselves. We have the opportunity create new relationships between student and teacher, farmer and chef, neighbor and neighbor. It makes so much sense. Our kids need delicious, nutritious food, and our farmers need new outlets for their food to sustain their businesses. It is a win-win in my opinion—connecting education with economic development. We make a dramatic difference in the health of our kids, while supporting our local farmers and fisherman, and preserving our local culinary heritage.

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