King Dining Commons Furniture
Demonstration Site for the School Lunch Initiative at Martin Luther King Middle School, Berkeley, CA

Created especially for the demonstration site of a pioneering public school lunch initiative, this

Created especially for the demonstration site of a pioneering public school lunch initiative, this furniture utilizes sustainable woods characteristic of the local bioregion. Students will learn that the furniture is made from ecologically harvested hardwoods representative of the local ecosystem; trees that might otherwise be cut up for firewood or wood chips are reclaimed for unique timber. Claro walnut has been culled from defunct walnut orchards while elm is milled from storm-fallen street trees; richly grained California bay laurel and cypress are also used. This reclaimed wood was air-dried for two years before being used to build the furniture.

Wowhaus also created the award-winning Edible Schoolyard Kitchen Classroom and mortice--and-tenon barn at the Edible Schoolyard. The Edible Schoolyard is a one-acre garden and kitchen classroom at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley. Its program involves King students in every aspect of planting and harvesting the garden and preparing fresh food. The Edible Schoolyard has been the primary project of the Chez Panisse Foundation, which was founded in 1996 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Alice Waters's Chez Panisse restaurant.

*The School Lunch Initiative envisions revolutionizing school lunch by making food a central part of the academic curriculum. The Initiative includes gardens, kitchen classrooms, and lunchrooms as contexts for learning. It restores connections between what children are taught and what they experience, between nutrition, health, and the ability to learn, between local communities and the farms that feed them. This project is a partnership of the Chez Panisse Foundation and the Berkeley Unified School District, in collaboration with the Center for Ecoliteracy and Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute.

www.schoollunchinitiative.org
www.chezpanissefoundation.org
www.edibleschoolyard.org