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Fink's Food Crusade
By Pamela Cuthbert
Fink's Food Crusade
by
Pamela Cuthbert
Paul Finkelstein in a promo shot for Fink!
?Food is power,? says Paul Finkelstein. Of course, he’s right ? and he knows it. The fast-talking, focused and positive-minded high-school teacher is on a crusade to harness that power, make it tasty in the process and ultimately use it to change the way the teenagers in his classroom eat, taste, cook and appreciate what’s on their plates.
By all accounts, Canada’s Pied Piper of good food is on to something. The 44-year-old Finkelstein, known to his students and colleagues simply as Fink, is running one of Canada’s most successful alternative eatery programs inside a school. Over the course of three years at Stratford Northern Secondary School, he and his young charges ? who generally either take charge or leave the program ? have managed to run an economically viable, healthy-foods cafeteria, the Screaming Avocado Café, which is considered hip for serving fare such as quinoa salad and braised rabbit. They have created a culinary club that raises funds for exploratory food-themed trips to Tokyo, the Northwest Territories and elsewhere. And collectively they have helped galvanize public opinion to pressure changes in government policy affecting institutional nutrition.
At the heart of Fink’s work is a serious issue: while the crisis of juvenile obesity and other health problems for children increase at an alarming rate in Canada and further afield, students continue to feed their bodies and bad habits with junk-food cafeterias and soda-pop vending machines that are conveniently located onsite in these temples of learning. Controversially, the schools are subsidized through funding mechanisms: buy that teeth-rotting mix of syrup and water, and it will help pay the bills ? help keep the lights on and the gymnasium equipped.
A decade ago, activist and celebrated chef Alice Waters was instrumental in creating the Edible Schoolyard Program in Berkeley, California at a public school of about 1,000 students in grades six through eight. What started out as a project to replace the micro-waved and packaged foods sold to kids in the parking lot has since grown into an eat-in kitchen classroom supplied through the school’s own one-acre garden. In a recent Slow Food publication (Waters is Vice President of the movement’s International division) the culinary revolutionary sized up the common sense behind the Edible Garden initiative: ?I believe that through the public school system we have the obligation and opportunity to restore the daily ritual of the table and bring kids into a new relationship to food. Only through the democratic reach of public education can we touch every child.?
Waters is Fink’s inspiration. Although he has never had the opportunity to meet his mentor, it was her work at the public-school level that guided him to trade in his chef’s cap for a teaching post. ?Her work is about sourcing local and about connecting kids to cooking. When I was studying at the Stratford Chef’s School, we were told to use local and fresh ? from the plot to the pot ? and that was her influence. Then I read about the Edible Schoolyard Program and I knew I wanted to do something like that.?
In 2002, Fink was hired as a Culinary Arts teacher. From there, he started on a path that began with after-school soup programs and led to the full-on Screaming Avocado. He recalls the first catering gig in October of that year with the newly formed Culinary Club. The objective was to raise funds to tour New York ? from Nobu to Noodletown ? and the crew worked out of an old family studies room. At the end of the evening, one of the guests approached Fink: ?They said: ?I think you need to talk to your servers. They’re using their hands to put ice in our glasses.’? The kids were taught the rules of proper service and six months later made it to the Big Apple.
Along the way, a few attempts to serve food on the school premises met with opposition. Fink had to be careful. For example, they could only serve food after 1:30, when the cafeteria closed, and a program to sell lunches to teachers had to take place offsite. In 2003, the contract for the school cafeteria suppliers was coming up for renewal. Fink approached Northwestern’s Principal Deborah McNair, knowing he would need the partnership of his boss to pry free his hands from the high-school cafeteria’s monopoly and of the contracts that usually bind institutional food services to commercial suppliers.
With the understanding that Fink would have to compete with the existing cafeteria (which still serves junk food down the hall), McNair agreed to let him open the Screaming Avocado in 2004. ?She has faith in us,? he says with his characteristic broad grin. But was he concerned about the logistics of making it financially viable. The strategy was to keep the costs low enough to entice cash-strapped students ? and yet the café’s own costs would be higher through sourcing from local, small-scale suppliers (instead of cheaper industrial companies). ?Market research showed this alternative would be driven by demand. These kids often don’t eat healthy at home, so they look for it elsewhere,? says Fink. ?You know, some kids have told us at the Screaming Avocado that this is the only healthy meal of the day.?
After a successful start, the battle is gaining ground: The Ontario Ministry of Health has ordered grade 7 and 8 students, who attend a neighbouring school, to eat at the Screaming Avocado ? and not the cafeteria ? whether they buy their lunch or bring it from home.
A typical day at the brightly coloured café sees the young cooks doing everything required in a professional kitchen, from cleaning fish to learning about butchering cuts of meat ? all to the blare of pumping music. Education doesn’t come with an ?eat-your-spinach’ approach: a team of kids fraternize with their peers during service, chitchatting about the handmade pizzas or about where their supplies come from. (Local producers, such as Mennonite farmers and a nearby butcher, provide many of the café’s raw materials.) In season, the menus feature whatever is ready for picking from the culinary program’s 3,000-square-foot organic garden.
Fink pushes the teens ?to appreciate the spectrum of food ? from the gourmet to the fact that others don’t have enough to eat.? On that first trip to New York, the crew packaged vegetables at a food bank in Harlem. Recently, the teacher pulled a fast one on the team during filming of a Food Network docu-soap called Fink, which is about him and the crew. En route to a luncheon at the top Toronto restaurant Canoe, and looking forward to foie gras and other fine fare, the kids suddenly found themselves instead cooking at a community kitchen for the homeless. Most of them stuck it out, making lunch for more than 100 ? and were rewarded with a great dinner at Canoe.
At the end of the day, this teacher challenges his students to learn about themselves through food. Sometimes it doesn’t work and kids drop out. Sometimes, as with 17-year-old Ben, the kitchen proves a good place to grow. Fink reports that Ben used to be unreliable, but with this new school year is one of the leaders, looking for the next lesson and encouraging his peers to tough it out. ?It took him two weeks, each day starting at 6:30 in the morning, and today he finally got the bread right. He didn’t want to give up.?
Fink airs Mondays at 10PM on Food Network Canada. Visit www.foodtv.ca for the full schedule.
______________________________Food journalist Pamela Cuthbert, a regular contributor to Macleans, remembers high school Home Ec classes as just one step above using an Easy Bake Oven.
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