Edible Schoolyard NOLA documentary premieres on fourth Katrina anniversary
Like many stay-at-home parents, Robert Lee Grant was wondering what to do with himself after his daughter graduated high school and left their California home to study at Boston College. Having been an economics professor at University of California, Berkeley and a businessman for 30 years, he was ready for something different; he wanted to have some fun and go on an adventure of his own. So he moved to New Orleans.
"I bought a house in March 2005," Grant explained, while relaxing in the carriage house at The Hubbard Mansion that he owns with some San Francisco friends. "Here I was just getting situated and socially becoming connected to people, and then all of a sudden Hurricane Katrina, and that changed everybody's life, right? Everybody had to evacuate and everybody was affected. So I happened to move to New Orleans during the most tragic period of New Orleans history."
But Grant has always had a personal philosophy to get him through the rough spots: 'Whatever negative happens to you, find an opportunity in the crisis.'
"I've always had a connection to artists, and I've always been a frustrated artist, and I've always wanted to create something. But I accepted the fact that I was not an artist and that I wasn't going to create something by the time I came to New Orleans, which was in the fall of 2004," Grant said. Of course, he was about to prove himself wrong.
Grant had first heard about Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard while teaching in Berkeley, and after the storm he heard the rumors that Chef Waters was considering putting another Edible Schoolyard in New Orleans. He knew he wanted to be involved, but he couldn't figure out how. Then his daughter got a summer job doing research at Cal Tech.
After deciding to spend the summer in California with her, Grant found himself a student again, this time in an intensive, five-week course at the San Francisco School for Digital Filmmaking. By the end of the class, he would have to produce a five-minute documentary, and that's when it all came together.
"I said, 'Why don't you take the course in San Francisco, and why don't you produce a documentary about the Alice Waters Edible Schoolyard program in Berkeley?'" Grant said. "And then you can take that film and bring it back to New Orleans when you come, and they can use that film to promote the Edible Schoolyard coming to New Orleans, and they can also raise money from it. And that's exactly what happened."
His five-minute documentary became the video that the Edible Schoolyard board sent out with fundraising request letters, and it eventually helped raise the $1.3 million to build the gardens at Samuel J. Green Charter School. Grant became a member of the Edible Schoolyard New Orleans committee and then became their official documentarian. He spent the next three years of his life recording 40 hours of footage in and about 'ESY NOLA.'
Part of the job entailed assisting a third grade classroom for an entire year, "so that I could get to know the kids and so that they would see me around and wouldn't start, every time I took out my camera, waving their hands and asking if they were going to be on TV," Grant said, smiling.
His final product, ready after six months of editing, is a 40-minute documentary entitled "Nourishing the Kids of Katrina: The Edible Schoolyard," and it will have its New Orleans premiere Saturday evening, August 29 - the fourth anniversary of the storm in the title. Other than a viewing in Sacramento's McKinley Park, we will be the first people to see Grant's first official documentary. Not even Erica Normand, one of the New Orleans producers, has seen the finished product yet.
It must be a good sign that one thing Grant's Sacramento audience members wanted to know was where they could get a copy of the DVD. In response, Grant is currently setting up a website to "facilitate DVD sales to people who want to buy it, and also to have a chatroom about organic gardening, sustainable agriculture, slow food, whole food. We also want to make, out of the film, a contribution to the debate about childhood obesity," Grant said.
Complete with appearances and commentary from Alice Waters, health professionals, students and their teachers, and President and First Lady Obama, whom Grant calls "a leading international spokesperson for good nutrition and healthy food," "Nourishing the Kids" is definitely poised to throw some new ideas into that dialogue.
"It's a crisis," Grant said of the state of childhood health. "You know that if something isn't done to move kids away from fatty and sugary foods, that the way they're going, this generation of kids is going to be the first generation to have a shorter lifespan than their parents, and that's just terrible. It's terrible for us adults to have so messed up the world that that's the situation, but that's what it is and that's why it's in crisis."
"We would like the film to be a part of finding a solution," Grant said, "because the Edible Schoolyard and the concept of it makes kids more aware of what they eat and where their food comes from and how to take better care of themselves as well as connecting to science and other subjects that they're learning in school. It's an all-around program and Alice calls this entire process or experience eco-gastronomy. She calls the Edible Schoolyard concept a course in eco-gastronomy, where you tie the schoolyard to the teachers that are teaching them and to the books and science and the earth or whatever."
An education in eco-gastronomy is far from the only thing the Edible Schoolyard program gives to its students. Children in grades kindergarten through eighth have been found to have a decrease in emotional problems and troublesome classroom behavior and better grades after just a year working in the gardens and taking cooking lessons.
"That's especially important in New Orleans after Katrina," Grant said, "because the kids who came back - the adults didn't get any therapy or psychiatric support, and the kids didn't get any either. So this program has functioned as that and it's been very therapeutic for a lot of the kids."
For the next year, Grant will be taking his film to festivals all over the world - London, Berlin, Montreal, Ontario, L.A., New York, even Cannes and Sundance - to add to the debate. It's keeping Grant so busy that he hasn't had time yet to think about what his next project will be. What's for sure, though, is that there will be one.
After all, with public health and nutrition finally gathering momentum as important topics of debate, "there are a lot of stories out there to be told," as Grant said. And he now has the means to do the telling.
"Oh, I am now an artist, oh yeah!" Grant said. "I've become an artist, yes, which is kind of cool."
The New Orleans premiere of "Nourishing the Kids of Katrina: The Edible Schoolyard" will be Saturday, August 29, at 8 p.m. at The Savvy Gourmet. The Savvy Gourmet is located at 4519 Magazine Street, a few blocks towards the river from Napoleon. The screening will be followed by a reception and discussion with filmmaker Robert Lee Grant.
written by Megan Wedderburn, April 16, 2010
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written by Sean Hobbs, September 22, 2009
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written by Professor Gloria G. Roberson, September 17, 2009
I have watched the trailer and it is very imprssive. My hat is off to Mr. Grant...
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written by Corinne, August 31, 2009
Good work, Robert, count me in to help!
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written by Mom, August 31, 2009
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