Health & Fitness
Growing Chips to the Children's Delight
Burton Valley Elementary students connect to their food in the Garden Classroom when they grew corn that enabled them to make tortilla chips.
“Can we grow chips to go with this salsa?”
An innocent question, posed by a third grader at Burton Valley while he ate the garden fresh salsa the class had grown, changed the way we plant in the Burton Valley Garden Classroom. I have taught garden classes since 2005 to kindergarden through fifth grade in our outdoor classroom where the kids get to grow what they want to eat, wash their veggies and cook them all in an afternoon’s lesson.
As a way to connect children to their food and where it comes from (No, potatoes don’t grow in plastic bags!) the garden classroom has been very successful. The 700+ students at Burton Valley visit the garden six or seven times during the school year and actually get their hands in the dirt.
When that third grader asked the question about growing chips, I paused a moment thinking whether or not it was possible to actually grow tortilla chips, and I decided all we needed was to plant flour corn instead of sweet corn. That spring we planted an entire bed of heirloom flour corn (Indian corn, as you might call it) along with its two sister crops, squash and beans, modeled after the ancient crop combination. When the students came back in the fall it was time to harvest the dried and quite colorful corn.
I discovered the corn needed to be soaked in a lime solution (calcium powder, not the citrus) before we could grind it. We first tried the ancient way of grinding corn with a stone mortar and pestle, which worked, but was a lot of work for the nine year olds. I purchased a corn grist from the Mexican supermarket and put that to work with the kids cranking the handle. The students were able to easily grind the corn into a fine flour. We added water and a dash of salt to make a paste, patted it into tortillas and toasted them. I then fried the tortillas in some hot oil to make chips, right before their eyes. The students all agreed that these chips tasted WAY better than any chip they’d ever eaten out of a bag. It turns out you can, in fact, grow chips to go with your salsa.
