Alice Waters

Chef, author, and proprietor of Chez Panisse Restaurant in Berkeley, Alice Waters is a pioneering proponent of cooking with fresh organic products served only in season. Alice’s commitment to education led to the founding in 1996 of the Edible Schoolyard, a one-acre garden and an adjacent kitchen classroom at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle School. The Edible Schoolyard, a program of Alice’s Chez Panisse Foundation, is a model public education program that gives students the knowledge and values they need to build a humane and sustainable future by actively involving them in all aspects of the food cycle. The program is nationally recognized for its efforts to integrate gardening into the core academic curriculum. The success of the Edible Schoolyard gave rise to the School Lunch Initiative, which aims to include nutritious daily lunch and experience cultivating food into the curriculum of all U.S. public schools.

Sam Levin

Sam Levin, a rising senior at Monument High School in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, is one of three co-founders of Project Sprout, an organic, student-run garden on the school grounds. As a freshman, Sam was already an avid naturalist. Now in its third year, Project Sprout supplies three school cafeterias with fresh fruits and vegetables, helps feed the hungry in the community, and serves as a living laboratory for students of the Monument School System. As the leaders, fundraisers, gardeners, educators, and believers that gardens can make a difference, Sam and his co-founders of Project Sprout are pioneers. As Sam relays, “The story of Project Sprout is a window through which all of us can get a glimpse at the power of youth. It is a promise to our parents, to all of you, that we will continue what you started.


The Watermelons of Memory
Roger Swain

Known as “the man with the red suspenders,” Roger Swain is familiar to many American gardeners as the host for 15 years of the popular PBS television program “The Victory Garden.” He is also the author of five books - Earthly Pleasures, Field Days, The Practical Gardener, Saving Graces, and Groundwork - and was co-host of “People, Places, and Plants” on HGTV and the science editor of Horticulture magazine. Roger, who earned a doctorate in biology from Harvard University, began his gardening hobby as a teenager by proudly exhibiting his homegrown vegetables at county fairs. According to Roger, all of us—whether we realize it or not—are linked to the garden because photosynthesis sustains almost all life on earth.

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