From Garden to Table in the Hall

From lettuce to berries to garlic and parsley, vegetables color the blacktop at the Humboldt County Juvenile Detention Center as part of a garden project that started with a single chef.

Beth Bailey, who has been cooking at the juvenile hall for more than 10 years, started the garden as the capstone project for her fellowship with the Chef Ann Foundation, a nonprofit promoting scratch cooking in schools.

“When they built the new juvenile hall facility, they had plans to put a greenhouse in one of the rec yards. So, I worked with the division director at the time, Ray Watson, to … brainstorm ideas about what we could do,” Bailey says. “But because it’s the county and everything takes so long, the greenhouse was kind of taking a long time. So, I talked to him about it like, ‘I’ve got this grant that we could do. Why don’t we do a little garden project? At least we can get something going.'”

While the Chef Ann Foundation fellowship program originally focused on encouraging scratch cooking in schools, Bailey became the first in the program to work at a juvenile hall, which qualified because it implements a federal youth nutrition program. Laura Smith, chief program officer at the Chef Ann Foundation, described Bailey’s role in the fellowship as a “unique scenario.”

“It was kind of a ‘Oh, we hadn’t thought of that,'” Smith says. “[Bailey] explained to us that they essentially have a school program on site that is a part of their facility, and she had a lot of really great explanations about the crossover that she envisioned, and that her leadership envisioned, to ensure that the students at their facility were also benefiting from some of the same things you would find at a traditional school district.”

According Humboldt County Probation Juvenile Corrections Division Director Dayna Wilcox, the new 30-bed juvenile hall facility in Eureka has an average daily population of 10, ages 12 through 25. (The majority housed there are ages 12 through 17.)

Bailey used the $5,000 grant accompanying the fellowship to build four raised garden beds on wheels and purchase gardening supplies. While some youth at the facility helped out with planting in the garden, their role has so far mostly been limited to taste-testing fresh crops and new recipes. Bailey envisions their taking a more active role moving forward, though.

“We were talking about maybe making our own hot sauce,” Bailey says. “The kids really like hot peppers and like spicy food. … So, I think it’d be really fun to grow some hot peppers and have our own, like, juvie hot sauce.”

While Bailey oversees much of the garden, she also receives assistance from Facility Manager Jason Beam and chef Chris Olsen. She has also consulted with Jesse Alm, the Humboldt County Office of Education’s school garden coordinator, for advice on what to plant.

As part of her capstone project, Bailey also replaced four of what she calls “heat-and-eat” dishes with made-from-scratch recipes, pointing to salsa, which used to come canned but is now freshly made, as one example.

“About once a week, we have something where we incorporate like a main dish that uses our garden produce but we [also] serve a salad every single day at lunch,” Bailey says. “Maybe we don’t use everything from the garden to make the salad [but] we can sprinkle in what we have. [If] we have kale that’s fresh and ready to go right now, put that in the salad, for sure … So, we use the garden all the time.”

The juvenile hall also participates in the Humboldt County Office of Education’s Harvest of the Month program, which is largely funded through the Department of Health and Human Services’ Cal Fresh Outreach Partnership Program and sees a different local produce item highlighted every month and sent to participating facilities for youth to sample. Bailey uses it as an opportunity to try new recipes and expose the children and young adults within the juvenile hall to something new.

Bailey says the exposure itself is important, even if they don’t like it, noting that at least after they are released and see it again, they’re not going to go, “Oh, what is that?”

“It’s like, ‘Oh, that’s kale. I’ve had that before,'” she says.

While not everything is made-from-scratch, Bailey says about 80 percent of the juvenile hall’s monthly menu is. She added that she tries to include new recipes or provide simple alternatives to high-processed meals like cereal by serving dishes like overnight oats instead.

Beam says that by incorporating alternative dishes to processed meals, the youths can learn that they can get a healthy meal without it being complicated and expensive.

“We have a lot of independent living skill classes that kind of parallel that, so they can learn and understand it, and kind of break the mindset of, ‘Wait till payday,I’m going to buy wings. I’m going to buy a pizza,’ and then [the money is] gone by Tuesday,” Beam says. “So, to get them to understand that ‘I can have this really high-quality stuff’ [by] just changing their mindset and having them prepare. They see what comes out of [our kitchen] and they eat it, and it really opens their mind to what they can do.”

Meenal Rana, a child development professor at Cal Poly Humboldt, says she participated in the Good Food Project in Michigan, which conducted focus groups in three different counties looking at children and their food choices.

“Some of the things we learned were that there were some children who have never seen a kiwi in their life, for example … so, they didn’t want to try it,” Rana says. “I think it’s important that there is early exposure to what kinds of vegetables and what kinds of fruits we have available in the area.”

Beam says many of the children who come into the juvenile detention center come from households with food insecurity, noting some have their first made-from-scratch meal at the juvenile hall.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as of 2023, approximately 47.4 million Americans had lived in food-insecure households, and 7.2 million children had lived in food-insecure households. The Chef Ann Foundation also reported that one in eight households with children can’t afford to buy enough food for the family. According to Feeding America, a nationwide collective of food banks, there was a 20-percent child food insecurity rate in Humboldt County in 2017, where 17 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty line, according to the U.S. Census.

“Another thing we learned [in the Good Food Project] was that healthy food doesn’t have to be expensive,” Rana says, adding that the perception of cost, however, is often a barrier.

She spoke of a mother in one of the focus groups who questioned the point of buying a bag of apples that are perishable to feed her children when processed food is cheap, accessible and doesn’t spoil. Rana says that having access to healthy meals in schools allows children from food-insecure families to get important nutrition, regardless of what is or isn’t being served at home.

“I think it’s important to keep in mind when we talk about food sustainability, not only is it good and organic, is it accessible economically to people?” Rana says. “It’s an equity issue when we are talking about that. It should be part of the school system because it is likely that if we have those healthy options in school, where children spend a lot of their time, every child will have access to healthy food regardless of their home background, regardless of their income level.”

Meenal says access to healthy and nutritional foods is essential to the development of children and teens, especially when it comes to their hormones.

“Hormones are a big part of food. That could be detrimental to young children’s bodies,” Rana says. “Their brain is developing at this time. [The] brain requires nutrition … all the parts of our bodies, including [the] brain … need fresh food and less processed food so that those hormones are not interfering in that growth and development.”

A 2022 study led by Jacqueline Vernarelli, associate professor and master of public health program director at Sacred Heart University, found that children between the ages of 3 and 5 who consumed more ultra-processed foods had less locomotor skill than their peers. The study also found that youths between the ages of 12 and 15 who consumed more ultra-processed foods demonstrated lower cardiovascular fitness.

Back at the juvenile hall, Bailey says she tries to make meals that are not only healthy and nutritious, but also delicious.

“I know that the kids don’t have a choice, that I’m in charge of the menu,” she says. “What I make is the only thing that they have. … I try to make it something that everybody would like.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated from a previous version to correct information about how runs the Harvest of the Month program. The Journal regrets the error.

Anne To (she/her) is a California Local News Fellow placed with North Coast Journal, Inc. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, or anne@northcoastjournal.com. The California Local News Fellowship is a state-funded initiative to support and strengthen local news reporting. Learn more about it at fellowships.journalism.berkeley.edu/cafellows.

This article appears in From Garden to Table in the Hall.