Stephanie Alexander says hands-on food education teaches everything from STEM skills to sustainability

The founder of the Kitchen Garden Foundation is pushing for the government to understand how vital hands-on food education is for every child’s development.

New wellbeing co-ordinators and kitchen garden programs in schools should get government funding to help boost mental health and positive food choices, culinary icon Stephanie Alexander says.

In an impassioned appeal to governments, the founder of the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation said hands-on food education programs “teach everything we say we want children to know” from STEM skills to sustainability and understanding diversity.

She said there was evidence of mental health benefits for children currently involved in the 1000 kitchen garden programs running in schools around the country, and this could provide valuable support in a post-pandemic setting.

“I hear from principals that when a kid’s feeling a bit down in the dumps, or overwhelmed, they often say, would you like to sit and hold Rusty the chicken, or whatever it’s called,” she said.

Ms Alexander says there are mental health benefits for children involved in the kitchen garden programs. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

“Students work together in the garden and in the kitchen discovering new textures and flavours and in the garden new insects and worms and all the magic of plant growth.

“And the garden can be a quiet place, the garden can be a place for sitting in to just recover for some children.”

Ms Alexander, 82, remains a hardworking advocate for the Foundation despite stepping down from the Board. She is still very involved in school visits and in the professional development for educators.

Any ongoing funding of wellbeing co-ordinators would not necessarily be tied to specific organisations.

Instead, schools could opt in for the funding, which would permit a wellbeing co-ordinator to structure programs that could include kitchen gardens.

“My dream would be that the Australian government understands the importance of this for every child’s development, and that it provides the recurrent funding for one member of staff – to be called a wellbeing co-ordinator or something similar.”

The Foundation that Ms Alexander created has impressive stats to back up her appeal, showing 97 per cent of children looking forward to school on days they are heading into the kitchen garden, and 87 per cent of parents notice a change in food behaviour.

She said children made dishes with food they have grown and then sit down and enjoy them together with their classmates and volunteers, with some children unable to contain their excitement at sitting around a table rather than in front of screens.

The Kitchen Garden Foundation has received some government funding previously but relies largely on philanthropic and corporate support, such as from Coles and other food suppliers, to maintain programs.

Ms Alexander made the call for new wellbeing funding during the Herald Sun’s Big V Interview series, during which she discussed her stellar career as a chef, writer, and educator.

Ms Alexander is a hardworking advocate for her foundation.

Stephanie Alexander does not do takeaway

“I can look at you and say I never have takeaway, except that I will occasionally buy some sushi or some chopped soy chicken,” she says.

“I just love preparing a beautiful meal.”

After describing her lunch plans in detail – a salad of washed and dried lettuce and witlof, mixed beans, radishes and a black Russian tomato drizzled with Australian olive oil – she gets frustrated at the idea that cost-of-living pain means families can’t eat healthy meals.

“I maintain that a lot of the time people don’t eat economically because they genuinely don’t understand how to do it,” she says.

Ms Alexander at her groundbreaking restaurant, Stephanie's, in Hawthorn. Picture: Supplied

This philosophy guided the celebrated chef to create the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation in 2004, and to introduce the ethos “grow, harvest, prepare and share”.

Hundreds of thousands of young people have had their relationship to food transformed, while being taught valuable life skills.

Alexander acknowledges she has been a role model for many Australians – particularly women – since she began blazing a trail through the food landscape in the 1960s.

“We did a lot of stuff that nobody else would even contemplate,” she says.

“And sometimes it was probably not so wonderful, but mostly it was wonderful.

“I had around me a group of people who were just so enthusiastic and followed my enthusiasm.”

But at the age of 82, Alexander says she’s now content to focus on her writing and advocacy for the foundation.

“I really am not very comfortable if I don’t have something to do,” she says.

“I’m (also) very aware, and reasonably comfortable – 90 per cent comfortable – with the fact that the world has moved on, and that the food world that is now here in 2023 has got very little to do with the food world that I worked in and helped shape.”

The French connection

Alexander spent most of her childhood in Rosebud, on the Mornington Peninsula, where her parents Winston Alexander and Mary Burchett established a caravan park.

Winston was a voracious reader and Mary a “wonderful cook”, which meant the house filled with books and cultural artefacts – and food.

Her grandpa would catch rabbits that were in plague proportions, and Alexander shudders with the memory of the “clink, clank” of his traps.

She also has a vivid memory of eels slithering across the kitchen floor after one of her mum’s cooking adventures went awry and dinner escaped from the sink.

Ms Alexander has been blazing a trail through the food landscape since the 1960s. Picture: Mirvac

It was a fortunate upbringing, she says, because her parents were from “a generation where they realised that education means everything”.

“They were very forward thinking, you know, they loved different people, they wanted to meet different people,” she says.

“Working with your hands was highly valued. My father was very into books, learning, ideas.”

The family treasured travel, and after Alexander trained as a librarian at university she set off to France on a cargo ship to recreate a journey her father had made decades earlier.

“The observation of the French way of life has remained one of the most important things in my life,” she says.

“Just seeing the way the general population felt about food, how it just played out in everyday life, without it being up in lights.”

It was during her travels that she met Jamaican-born Rupert “Monty” Montague, who she would marry and with whom she opened her first restaurant.

Jamaica House was born in Lygon St, Carlton in 1966.

That same year, the couple welcomed a baby girl.

Commotion in the kitchen

On opening night at Jamaica House, Stephanie’s daughter Lisa was three weeks old.

After recalling that momentous but hectic time of her life, Alexander sighs.

“It wasn’t easy, and, you know, it put enormous strain on everybody,” she says quietly.

The intention was for a “pretty simple little retail store selling the odd canned product and tea and coffee and sandwiches”. It quickly ballooned into a Carlton restaurant institution.

“I start to do something, and it gets bigger and bigger,” she says.

Alexander is piercingly honest about her work ethic and its impact on Lisa who “suffered enormously” from a disrupted childhood, divorced parents, and the loss of her father Monty to illness when she was 14.

Maggie Beer and Stephanie Alexander. Picture: Jason Robins/Instagram

Holly, born to second husband and barrister Maurice eight years after Lisa, was 2½ when Alexander’s next venture – Stephanie’s restaurant – opened.

“That was probably easier because she was already in daycare,” Alexander says.

“Although there is this famous story, which she thinks is very funny, where I’ve taken her there still in her pyjamas.”

Stephanie’s exploded and began to revolutionise eating in Victoria, shifting to a Hawthorn mansion filled with flowers, perfect place settings and important people.

Things just kept getting bigger.

Alexander speaks about that time with a sense of pride tinged, perhaps, with mild remorse about the impact some decisions had on others.

“You can sometimes look back and say, I think I would have done it differently or I should have done things differently, but I didn’t,” she says.

The Alexander women today, together with Stephanie’s seven-year-old granddaughter, “get on remarkably well these days, but we’re all very different”.

In 1992, Alexander and Maurice divorced, and she has described the fear of having to learn more about the financial side of the business.

Running a restaurant during a recession elevated those concerns, but in 1996 the publication of what would become known as Australia’s culinary bible – The Cook’s Companion – changed Alexander’s fortunes.

It went on to sell more than half a million copies and allowed Alexander to embark on a new chapter of life as an author and food educator.

Changing the food narrative

Stephanie Alexander always backed local producers during her long culinary career.

In the 1980s, after a trip to France inspired a new dish at her restaurant, she had to reach out to a new breed of suppliers when local farmers could not be sourced.

“I needed garden snails, and I paid local kids to collect them,” she says.

“They were very successful, but it was a lot of work and I was definitely overpaying – I think I was paying five cents a snail, and of course they would turn up with a hundred snails that were all filthy.

“Then you had to clean them, and put them in clean rubbish bins out in the backyard of the restaurant to purge.”

Ms Alexander’s book The Cook’s Companion has sold more than half a million copies. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

Teaching generations of children how to forage for food has become her life’s passion through the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation – though snails remain off the menu.

Listing the benefits of the program, from supporting mental health to boosting skills in mathematics and science, Alexander says she tried not to get “preachy” about the program, but in the next breath describes it as her “hope for civilisation”.

“It teaches children everything that we say we want them to know, we want them to really feel strongly about sustainability, not because they’re being lectured at but because they can see that their garden won’t thrive if it’s not watered and the plants aren’t supported,” she says.

At the end of classes, children will make meals from food they have grown, including a “salad of the imagination”.

“Every group puts a plate of what they’ve made on the table, never dished up, always on a platter, and everybody has to learn to pass it around,” she says.

“An awful lot of kids, when they come to sit down at the table they are in a state of wild excitement because they never sit at a table. They always eat in front of a screen.

“It’s such a novel experience, and that makes me very excited when I see it, but it also makes me sad.

“It all comes from family modelling and because too many Australian families, Anglo-Australian families, have not ever grown up themselves with food being given any sort of real importance.”

The program is offered at 1000 schools and early learning centres across the country, but has faced recent challenges including the pandemic and natural disasters.

It is boosted by philanthropic grants and sponsors such as Coles, but Alexander says her “dream” is for long-term, recurrent, government funding.

“I believe that if every child in Australia had two years of this experience in their primary education, we would be raising a very different country.”

The next chapter

Having thought her travel days were done during the pandemic, Alexander is now dusting off her passport.

A cruise on the Rhone in France beckons; a return to her source of inspiration.

She says she is now “more anxious about boring things” when travelling at an older age, and is upfront about the cracks appearing in her mind and body.

In her memoir A Cook’s Life she describes a faltering memory as being like trying to catch globs of jelly slipping through fingers.

“I write a lot of lists,” she tells the Herald Sun.

“I don’t enjoy that it’s happening but I think it’s probably better to acknowledge it than to pretend it’s not.”

She also takes exercise classes to help with balance.

While Alexander has resigned from the board of her beloved foundation she still attends strategy meetings, visits schools, does videos promoting fresh produce for Coles, and appears in webinars as part of professional development for educators across the country.

Another book is also coming – her 19th – written largely during the pandemic.

She hints that this one is about cooking as families and will use the kitchen garden program for inspiration.

There’s also a movie in the works, after producers commissioned a script – not written by Alexander – about a trip to Tuscany with fellow food luminary Maggie Beer in the 1990s.

Alexander says she and Beer are not taking it too seriously yet, but it has not stopped the old friends having a laugh about important details.

“The million-dollar question is, who’s going to play us?” she says.