From Berkeley Hills to Capitol Hill: Carolyn Federman's Food Literacy Crusade

Summary

In this episode, Amy Boyle interviews Carolyn Federman, the founder of the Charlie Cart Project. Carolyn shares her journey from working with chef Alice Waters to launching the innovative Charlie Cart Project, which brings food education to schools and organizations. The chapters cover topics such as the inspiration behind the project, the challenges faced in starting it, the importance of mentors, the universal curriculum, measuring success, and the role of the project in ending childhood hunger. Carolyn also provides advice for career pivots and emphasizes the importance of family meals.

The Charlie Cart Project
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On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee

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Transcript

Welcome to season two, episode six of the Speaking of Phenomenal podcast. I'm your host, Amy Boyle. In today's episode, we have the privilege of speaking with Carolyn Federman, the visionary founder of the Charlie Cart Project. 

Carolyn shares with us her transformative journey from working alongside legendary chef Alice Waters to spearheading the innovative Charlie Cart Project. 

This initiative brilliantly combines mobile kitchens with a robust curriculum bringing essential food education directly to schools and organizations aiming to tackle childhood hunger at its roots. 

Carolyn discusses the pivotal role of food education in shepherding informed nutritional choices among children by empowering them to lead healthier lives. She sheds light on how this initiative not only benefits young learners, but also enriches educators and communities at large.

Carolyn will address the critical importance of collaboration within the nonprofit sector, offering insights into how these elements fuel the mission to end childhood hunger by the year 2030. Stay tuned as we explore the impactful world of food education with Carolyn Federman. 

Welcome to the Speaking of Phenomenal podcast, Carolyn. I am so glad you're here. Thank you so much for having me, Amy. It's great to be here. As I often do, we have to give our shout out to who put us together. It's no longer six degrees, we're one degree of separation from the fabulous Shannon Gomes. Shannon kicked us off for episode one of season two. So I'm so glad she introduced the two of us. Could you give us a background on the phenomenal you? Thank you. Yes, I am a California girl and I was born and raised in a family of people who love to eat and cook. So that was my orientation.

We planned all our travel around our meals. We ate dinner together every night and it was definitely the centerpiece of my upbringing. And so it was no great surprise when I landed in Berkeley, California, working for chef and activist Alice Waters, who runs the restaurant Shave Panisse and also a nonprofit called the Edible Schoolyard.

And she really changed the course of my life working, seeing the impact that she had on kids and understanding how central what we eat and where our food comes from is to everything. It seems to be the nexus of just about everything that's important in this life. So she influenced me greatly and after working with Alice for many, many years, I am determined to make food education accessible to kids everywhere. And that led me to launch a nonprofit called the Charlie Cart Project. Amazing. So tell us more about what the Charlie Cart Project is and what was that aha moment for you that made you go from working in other spaces, the edible schoolyard, to take on such a big role on your own. Well, there were many moments that came together to unlock the idea of the Charlie Clark Project, but I would suppose that the aha moment was when I was teaching cooking in my children's classrooms as a volunteer, occasionally.

And I had to lug all of the equipment up a really big hill every time I wanted to do that. And the kids absolutely loved it. Every kid in the whole classroom loved it. And you saw that even here in Berkeley, California, there were kids who had never eaten lettuce before. And so I knew that it was important, but it was such a pain to do it. It was difficult to organize everything by myself and really hard to lug all the equipment up that hill. And I thought, wouldn't it be great if we had a place to store all of this stuff so I didn't have to carry it up and down, make so many trips from the car. So I guess that was the light bulb moment that said, what if there was some kind of mobile kitchen here stored at the school that held everything for me and that I didn't have to do all this by myself. And the Charlie Cart was born from that. What's the name? What does it mean? The Charlie Cart. So after I decided to create this little compact mobile kitchen so people could teach hands -on cooking in the classroom and in any room, I did some research and I found that I had been inspired at a conference in the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery in the UK, to learn that there was a compact mobile kitchen called the Cuisine Roulant from World War I in France. And I imagine these soldiers marching along their Cuisine Roulant with their cassoulet bubbling away inside. I thought, wow, we need something like that. So that did help spur the Munch of Charlie Cart.

But when I came home from that conference, I did my research and I found that the chuck wagon of the American prairie actually preceded the cuisine roulette. And so that was one of the very first mobile kitchens. And so the Charlie cart is meant to be the great, great grandchild of the chuck wagon. Oh, I love that. Oh, that's so fantastic.

Yeah, I could totally see that, that it carries on in that family lineage. When it comes to taking that idea and starting in your children's classroom and dreaming it bigger to expand, what were some of your first or biggest challenges to get that cart rolling, so to speak?

To be honest, it had so much to do with manufacturing. Manufacturing is an old boys' network and there are not a lot of women in manufacturing. And I'm a very small person and that combination of being a woman, being really small and I don't look very tough. I'm not a super tough person. And I didn't know anything about manufacturing.

So I was learning as I was going. So the men would look at me like, oh, we can see her coming a mile away. And it was really, really tough. And that kept me up at night negotiating with those guys, trying to ensure that the quality was of the level that I wanted. I wanted it to be absolutely perfect. I didn't see any reason why it shouldn't be absolutely perfect, sturdy.

Durable, beautiful, flawless. And they did not see that. So I would come with my flashlight inspected and they drove them crazy. We had so many arguments and my expectations were so high and my standards were so high. And I moved manufacturers several times in the beginning as I was learning and growing and moving from.

One set of expertise to another as we became more sophisticated and I started to understand manufacturing more on the systems. But that was definitely the biggest challenge. That was really hard. It's so frustrating. Did you have an ally or someone who helped mentor or coach you in this? Or you just barreled down and got it done? No, I 100 % had a mentor and she was so amazing. We had two amazing women mentors. So I had one at the time we had sponsorship from Blue Apron from the very very beginning and one of the founders of Blue Apron lent me his director of supply chain and she flew out and went to the interviews of the manufacturers with me. She helped me put together the RFP so I had so I had her and then I had a woman who was a an incredible mentor was, she was a director of operations her entire career and she was on like 12 boards and she would go with startups and get them all set up and then move on to the next and she mentored me through all of that manufacturing stuff and she mentored every single person on my team for years and years and years. So we were so fortunate to connect with generous people who gave us their time and we would not be anywhere without those people Nina Richardson and Claire Cochran. Yeah, and Claire's on our board now. So That's wonderful. And I think we need to rebrand mentorship anyway, clearly. Throw out an idea. We'll get that one going too. Right. Yeah, I'm with you. Women's Mentor Podcast. Let's do that next. 

So having the idea of the passion, the need and now you have a physical product. So when we first talked, you mentioned you started off with about two and now at almost 500. What does that feel like and how do you see the future with the project?

It feels amazing. I'm so proud of what we've accomplished and I honestly owe so much to my great team. They're so strong. I have such a great team. And also we owe so much to the educators. Everything that we do is word of mouth. All of our growth is by word of mouth. So the folks that are taking on this food education in their communities are the people that are spreading the word about the Charlie Kurt project. And so we owe it to them as well, the growth. It's just been, speaking of phenomenal. It's been phenomenal. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. So like you said, you've got a curriculum and educators and people that are organically helping spread the word. Where do you come up with a universal curriculum, I guess, to make this successful?

That was another challenge. So the goal was to introduce young people to fresh produce. So what we did was we created a curriculum that has 54 lessons, and they are all based on seasonal recipes that are plant -forward. There's a little dairy, but there's no meat. With produce that is universally accessible.

So we tried to keep it really simple. Carrots, cabbage, things that you find in every grocery store across the country. Obviously, in some areas, there is no access to fresh produce. And there are things in the curriculum that might be new to folks and harder to come by. For example, cilantro. Some people don't have access to fresh herbs like that. We did a lot of research.

What's seasonal, what's available across the country and at different times. And we focused on the school seasons, fall, winter, spring. There are definitely some challenges that we're trying to address now. So now we're almost 10 years in and we've had the static curriculum.

And we know that our educators are making modifications based on where they are and what they need. And it's not just about what's accessible, but it's also about what's culturally relevant to them. So our big push now is to connect those educators in some type of forum so that they can share the recipe modifications that they're making with one another.

And that can be really inspiring for folks and really helpful in terms of actually executing a successful program. So that's one thing in terms of curriculum development. And then the other thing is partnering with organizations that can help us add to the curriculum, add recipes to the curriculum that we can put into our lesson plan template that can be more culturally relevant. You want to be featuring foods that are familiar to kids while still maintaining that thread, we're focusing on fresh produce. We're moving away from ultra -processed foods. So I'm thinking about what you're talking about with the curriculum and then your background with Edible Schoolyard. Where do you see the through line or the common thread between what you had been doing and your inspiration for what you're continuing to do today? I was hugely influenced by the setup of the edible schoolyard. So when you enter into that kitchen classroom, there is one model edible schoolyard project in Berkeley, which has influenced thousands and thousands across the world, actually. But when you step into that kitchen, there are three big tables. And the students gather around the three big tables. The approach and how we train the educators to use the Charlie Card is exactly the same setup. In the edible schoolyard, you have stations where all the kids can actually cook. So since the Charlie Card is small and it's not designed for that, the approach is you wheel the Charlie Card into the classroom and you push the desks together and you put some either butcher paper or oil cloth over this desk, and wham, you have created a prep kitchen. And the students gather around those tables and they each make the full recipe. And in that way, while they may not be using a hot plate or a burner, they are still measuring, mixing, tasting, smelling, and chopping. So they're doing all the really, critical components of putting these recipes together. And then the teacher can have the opportunity of whether or not they want to bring the kids up to the Charlie Cart and do the heat portion of the cooking and have the students involved in that or not. So it was really, again, heavily influenced by that experiential program at the adult school yard. When it comes to measuring the success of the program per location. What kind of metrics are you following to see growth or change? We did an evaluation with John Hopkins around the pilot of the program, and the results were astounding. We found that something like 78 % of kids had tried a new food, 63 % of kids were asking their parents to make that food at home. And this was only three lessons and they were all salads. So it was remarkable, the data. And since then, as we've grown, our interaction as an organization is with the educator and not directly with the students who participate in the classes. So we've done much more data collection on the educator and how the the efficacy of the program from their standpoint. So we're actually just launching an evaluation program to support our educators to measure the impact on their class participants. And so many of our organizations, so I call them our network, so so many of our network have not been measuring the impact of their cooking programs and are eager for a tool to do so. So we just have created tool for them and we're piloting that this spring. So next year if we talk again I will have a lot more data for you. How do people choose to be a part of the program? How it works is the organizations purchase a cart and with that cart they get the curriculum, they get training, they get basically it's like a membership for life in our network.

We provide all sorts of programming with that and they get all the tools and equipment. So you get this all -in -one program. So they purchase the program and how they decide to do that is generally you have kind of like, we call them a champion, a champion on site who really wants to take their food education to the next level and they want to provide this experiential education model.

And they'll go searching for it online and they find it online and then they reach out to us and we start a conversation and then when they're ready to purchase, we ship out the Charlie cart, we get them trained and then it goes from there.

Carolyn, I'm so excited to hear more about the Charlie Cart Project. Can you tell us why it's so vitally needed? It's critical that children eat well. And we have such a challenge with malnourishment in this country. You have, in the same household, you can have children who are malnourished, are undernourished, and children who are suffering obesity.

And that has everything to do with what they're eating. And a lot of it is because families are up against this avalanche of advertising and access issues that have so much to do with systemic racism, with social inequity, with poverty. And they're up against this mountain of challenge. And what we want to provide with the Charlie Cart Project is an antidote, is a means to be informed so that you can get out from under that avalanche. Just having information changes your access. So we want to both inform children, of what is available out there in the world. We want them to provide exposure so that they can know firsthand that they might actually like these foods when there's probably a lot of influences telling them that they won't.

So it's about children's health. It's about their ability to make important decisions. And it's about equity. Well, thinking about the food education that we're discussing and trying to get this more ubiquitous in the classroom setting and maybe even outside the classroom for that matter, what are some of your goals and aspirations to help achieve that vision of the Charlie Cart?

I'm very interested in working closely with our network of educators to help them be inspired, be as successful as possible, to give them all the resources that they need to keep going with their food education programs. I want to solve all the challenges for them. So I want to hear from them and I want to connect them and I want to help them be successful.

So I think that's how we're going to make it ubiquitous by listening to folks and finding out what they need and how we can help them get it. I think it takes a lot of extra initiative right now to institute a food education, a hands -on food education program. It's a lot of work. And you have to really want to do it. And you have to love to do it.

So we want to look at what is prohibiting folks from doing that and then get in there and figure out what are the physical things we need to provide you, what are the intellectual things that we need to provide you, what's the moral support we need to provide you, and then how can we work that into policy initiatives so that food education is built in.

Everywhere children go to learn. Oh, that ties in perfectly to your network and future partnerships. But I think you're also working on something from what you were carrying those pots and pans up the hill to Capitol Hill. Maybe you'd like to share a little bit with our audience about what helping eradicate childhood hunger might look like. From lugging equipment up the hill to Capitol Hill. Here comes the Charlie Cart project.

It needs its own bumper sticker for that. I can see it. It's gonna be awesome. You're a genius. So we are working with the Vitamix Foundation, and they have been a sponsor of the Charlie Cart Project since the very beginning. They have provided a Vitamix blender for every Charlie Cart since the very first cart we shipped. So they've been a fantastic partner. They were invited by the White House to participate in the initiative to end childhood hunger by 2030. And they reached out to us and said, we need a partner who has boots on the ground. Can you partner with us on this? And we were absolutely thrilled to be involved in that and included in that. And we recently went to the White House. There was a conference to welcome the newest commitments to this initiative. So each year since 2023, the White House is bringing in new partners to this initiative. So they welcomed us as part of the new cohort. And all of these organizations got together and got to network. And part of the work of this White House initiative is to network everyone together and create ongoing opportunities for conferences and committees so that we can leverage one another's work. And it's actually such an incredible opportunity because nonprofits are so often siloed and there's so many of us and we don't necessarily leverage one another's work in the best, most effective way. So this is at the, you know, highest scale opportunity to work with one another and move the needle on food access, nutrition, and food education issues. I love what you said about leveraging each other's work. Two episodes ago, we had Lisa Dietlin, and she is a key philanthropist that works with doing just that. How to put the right energy together so that you have more power because you're stronger together. And it's very hard to watch people spend so much time and money on overhead and fundraising and when really their true capacity is in the program work and you just want to see people be able to move things forward and there's so many of us and we're so small and as you know nonprofits are often overlooked or looked upon as less serious. I have so many people ask me if this is my full -time job. It's an 80 hour a week job. Oh my goodness.

Yeah. And I manage people and I do financials and I understand how business works. And people often don't think of nonprofit in that way. Well, the fact that you could even answer those challenges with a smile, albeit not that smile on your face. I understand completely. Thinking about what you're going to be doing with this initiative, what role does the Charlie Cart project play in contributing to ending childhood hunger.

I'm so excited that we are part of this because food education has not been seen as a critical component to food access. And it 100 % is. How can you possibly access good nutrition if you don't have any information or any background about it? If you are provided a vegetable that, say, from the food bank that you are unfamiliar with and you don't know how to prepare that. Are you gonna actually eat it? Chances are you might not. And we actually have heard from some food banks that that's the case, that food that people aren't familiar with does get wasted. So being acknowledged and included in this initiative means that the powers that be are really starting to recognize the importance of food education in food systems and in the food access equation. So what we are doing is fulfilling that role, the food education piece. And I'm very proud, and I'm really excited. Thank you for that question. It was a great question. I'm glad that what your background is doing with your excitement and your passion and your knowledge is getting out further so that we can help the greater society that needs us so desperately. 

When I was working for Alice Waters, we did a lot of school food work. And I remember there's a woman in school food, Ann Cooper, who was doing training with nutrition services directors across the country. And she was doing training on how to institute scratch cooking in the cafeterias. And one of the women raised her hand and said, well, what do you do with a raw potato?

And had no idea how to start. And so Anne just said, well, the first thing you do is peel it. And she showed them. And we take so much of this for granted. And these are basic things that are going to unlock so much good nutrition and good health for folks. And it's also about economics, right? I mean, I think that people have been misled to believe that a meal at McDonald's is going to be less expensive for them, right? But in the end, if you buy a chicken and you learn how to make a soup or a stock and use every little part of that chicken, that can last your family for a week. And if you spend $9 on that chicken, you are definitely saving money over McDonald's.

You know, so I think it's an economic question to this education, but we have a long way to go. Well, it's a great place to start because I agree. When do you think about when you can get more out of what you already have or what you can purchase and see that purchase power go further? And the pride of making it yourself to learn a new skill, to see your friends and family light up because of the love and care that you're now sharing over a meal. I mean, that alone is, it's so incredible to see that when that comes to fruition. The smell in the house, it does, it does convey love. It does convey comfort and warmth. Absolutely. And then not to mention the health benefits. If you're eating that chicken all week, as opposed to fast food, the amount of sodium and everything else.

What advice would you give someone looking to pivot into a passion project that is more than a passion project? It is a career, it's a lifestyle. It's no hobby by any stretch of the imagination. How do you wake up with that goal in you? One of the things I did was ask everyone around me. And when I say everyone around me, I mean the person who was cutting my hair, my dad, my sister, my mentors. So I was really fortunate that I could reach out to Alice Waters and Michael Pollan. And I know that not everybody has that kind of access. You may not have those mentors. But I also made cold calls. I made a cold call to one of my food heroes, Harold McGee, and he answered. He answered the phone and he talked to me. And now he's on my advisory board, he's given me so much support, I meet with him, he answers questions. I mean, so just, you have to just go for it. You cannot hesitate. You, and so that's the first piece of advice I would say is ask everyone in your orbit because you just never know where that critical piece of advice is gonna come from. And everyone, everyone, everyone has something to share with you.

No matter their station in life, what their career path has been, everyone knows something that you don't know. So I'm a big believer in that. It's just a little cliche, but everyone will tell you not to do it. So once you make the decision, you just gotta stick with it, because everyone will tell you not to do it. Right, because challenge is challenge, right? And once you know and that fire is lit from within, I love you seeking input and thoughts from anybody you come in contact with so that you can gain that nugget of inspiration and knowledge that, like you said, they know something we don't know. And it becomes this bigger thing.

As far as the Charlie Cart Project for you personally, how has that affected your views on food and education and community building? Oh, wow. That's such a good question.

Profoundly. I was a big believer in food education after working for the Edible Schoolyard, but I've seen it even more firsthand through the Charlie Cart Project. And one of the things that's been such a blessing in this job is that I have been able to go visit a lot of the sites personally.

And going across the country like that to places that I probably would never go and the opportunity to meet people who are inspired to make their communities better has been so moving and so hopeful, especially in these times when our country's so divided. What I have found is that,

Then we go about things differently. Everybody wants the same thing. They want a happy, healthy life. They want happy, healthy children. And if we can find a place to connect about that, I think that can bring a lot of healing. And, it's also incredibly helpful because you see people.

You know, especially when we go to these rural communities and people just love their communities. They love the children and their communities and they're doing so much, taking so many extra steps to support them. And that really reinforces the notion that there's so much beauty in this world and there's so much goodness and you know, we've focus on, there's been a lot of, it's been a tough few years, right? It's been a tough time and we focus on all the bad things, but there are so many good people out there and they're doing so much good work. And so I've been moved to see that and it's inspired me to be a better person in a lot of ways, I think personally. And I think it's really helped my kids too, to see it.

Definitely, when you can share more stories and it goes from being impersonal to personal, that glimmer in a child's eyes when they realize that this is capable for them and that they're happy and fulfilled and their tummies are happy. I mean, how exciting is that, right? I have four children. There's nothing more exciting than when -  they're not small anymore, but when they were like that simple thing that makes you feel so warm and fuzzy inside and when you could do that globally or even locally and then go global. Wow. Congratulations. Cooking is really confidence building, really confidence building. And we hear that a lot from the educators too. And I think it's not just for the kids. I think the educators gain a lot of confidence from mastering these lessons and thinking about how they eat themselves and how they shop. And it certainly has that impact on the kids. Yeah, and like you said, that ripples out. I think I've been doing for this whole season, asking our guests for book recommendations, anything that is something you constantly turn to or something that is really inspiring you now. Right now I'm spending a lot of time reading cookbooks. One of my favorites books, which are maybe not that accessible for folks, it's called On Food and Cooking. It's kind of a Bible of chefs and it's like an encyclopedia of food and chemistry and it talks about the interaction of different foods, the origin of different foods, ingredients, and what happens when you prepare them, what happens at different heat levels.

And it's like I said, it's like a reference book. So that's, it's really fun if you're getting into experimental cooking to try to understand what's happening underneath the cooking process. So On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee, that's a great one. And then I've been spending a lot of time exploring different cultures and cooking. So I'm cooking a lot out of a book called Sofra, which is a Persian cookbook and it's absolutely beautiful. And my go-to thing that I would say if we want to leave everybody with something is just eat dinner with your family. Make a point to eat dinner with your family. I always made an extra effort not just to eat dinner but to eat breakfast with my kids, which is pretty unusual. And I know that kids, especially as they become teenagers, they're on the go, they're running out, they run or go early, they go late.

They sleep late, but if you can schedule that 15 minutes in the morning, even if it's just a bowl of cereal, if that's what you're serving, I would actually make them breakfast every morning and we would sit down and we eat it together. And it was a really beautiful ritual and a way to connect and a way to start the day grounded, focused, and ready to go. So I would highly recommend that.

I love that and it's something that I've definitely taken to heart. If more people can put that luxury to the forefront of a priority for them, maybe we'd see a lot of different changes. If not just for the people directly involved, for the people they come in contact with later in their day. It's pretty, pretty powerful. I'm so excited to hear you say that that's a major must do for you, a non -negotiable, if you will.

Yeah, and it's hard, it's really hard for people to even imagine that because people work two jobs or they're so busy. But I'm talking about 10 minutes. Even if, what if it's only just having your warm drink together? You know, if you're having coffee, they're having hot chocolate or tea or whatever, something so that you're just grounding that day and looking across the table at one another and that kids aren't eating alone.

How do people get involved if they want to bring the Charlie Cart to their local school or community group? They can visit us at charlicart.org and write to us at info@charlicart .org. I will be sure to put all of that in the show notes as well as everything else that we talked about is linkable and so the people can get involved and interact and share ideas because I'm very excited for the future of all the wonderful things you're working on and I can't wait to see the progress. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. 

Thank you for joining us on this episode of Speaking of Phenomenal. Be sure to subscribe, rate, review, and even share the podcast, as well as stay tuned for more inspiring conversations.

Remember, each and every one of you is capable of extraordinary things. Until next time, take care and remember, you are phenomenal.