About The Program

Garden Kitchen Lab is a backyard-to-table, science-based, hands-on educational experience offered at certain recreation centers. An intergenerational, cross cultural educational model that combines urban agriculture, culinary and STEAM disciplines.

This seasonal program provides youth with the skills to start and sustain a food-producing garden, while demonstrating the links between food production, the environment, and their health.

To find out how you or your child can be a part of Garden Kitchen Lab, visit NYC Parks

Our Philosophy

Garden Kitchen Lab was designed for children, shaped over the last 9 years by feedback from children and educators’ transformative experiences. The current curriculum captures this ‘magic’, and turns it into a readily implementable program of activities.

– Anthropology and the role of food in various cultures;

– History, including historic foodways to honor the different cultures that inhabit this Land; Lenape because we are standing on unceded Lenape Land and honor their plant knowledge. West African to highlight the agricultural knowledge of the enslaved West African people who lived and worked in Manahatta, which later turned into New Amsterdam.

– Biology and the cycles of life and death as illustrated through composting in the garden;

– Chemistry, and the composition and transformation of cells as explored through microscopes in the lab;

– Physics and what happens at a molecular level when food transforms in fermentation when one mixes it or makes a reduction (molecular gastronomy); and

– Advocacy and how to talk about healthy eating in media and their video stories and stop motion videos

The diversity of topics in the program makes it appealing to a wide variety of children: some revel in the science, others in cooking and making things from the garden, others in eating. While the curriculum is scientifically “correct”, it has also been specially developed to capture the attention of all children, and to empower them through important roles (such as sous-chef or documentary photographer). This intricate mix of science and whimsy is what makes Garden Kitchen Lab a unique and powerful program for engaging children and their communities.