How hard is it to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? Kids laugh when we ask that. They think we are ridiculous. "Ha! Not hard at all!" they say. "Duh, you take two pieces of bread, jelly and peanut butter and put it together." And how much does that cost - $5.00? we wonder. "Naaaw, one dollar!" they guess. "Nope, we suprise them, just $.45 cents for a whole grain organic PB&J sando!" PB&J. It's easy. It's cheap, so why aren't more kids brown bagging it nowadays? We think they simply aren't in the habit. And we're hoping to change that.
RootDown LA showed up for Jefferson High School's four freshmen leadership retreats this fall - to bring the art of simple sandwich making back. It didn't stop with PB&J though. On four hot Fridays in Will Roger's Park, in just an hour, senior leaders, teachers and the freshmen cranked out five different kinds to total 150 sandwiches. Grilled cheese and tomato, tuna fish, BLT's, chicken Caesar salad, and of course PB&J sandos (as we call them) were all on the menu with fresh cut local fruit, much of which was donated from our partner farm, McGrath Family Farms.
So what's the cost for our mostly organic, local, seasonal sandwich and fruit menu? Total food costs came in under $300.00 per trip which, given leftovers each week, was less than $2.00 per student lunch.
And, for those who griped at first, when they saw whole grain bread, tomatoes on grilled cheese, or raw onions diced into the tuna salad, they sure didn't complain when it all came together, tasted GREAT, filled up their bellies and fueled their brains.
Less we forget our good manners! We of course must thank our super amazing volunteers who came out and helped make the events, all four of them! so much smoother. Thank you much Corinna, Ben, Christianne, and especially our grilled cheese and tomato maestro, Alex!
Our new RootDown LA Youth Coordinator, Roxana Reyes, interns, Cesar Guerra and Alejandro Pais and Manual Arts students, Yesica Perez and Jessica Solano held their first healthy food focused activity recently - a WATERMELON lemonade! sale to raise funds to send students to the Bioneers Conference in October.
Manual Arts High School Senior, Cesar Guerra reports... Well it was pretty fun to have the lemonade sale on Friday. We really got to use our “cooking” skills and people talking skills. We were making a natural lemonade [instead of the powder and artificially flavored kind] that was not only healthy for you but it was very good. We made it out of lemons, chunks of watermelon which was very sweet, mint, and instead of sugar we used agave sweetener.* Everybody had a job to do so Alejandro was cutting the watermelon while two other girls cut the lemons. As for me I was stirring and mixing the ingredients. We had a great time making jokes and laughing and the scary part for me was talking to the teachers but when I saw Alejandro doing it then I got courage, opened my mouth and thank god words came out. The lemonade was $1 dollar but some people were generous and gave us like $5 or $20 dollar bills we made about $50 bucks that day. But yeah I liked the experience and I would like to do it again.