Pizza Party

So tonight I cooked with 11 undergraduates. We made a close to vegan pizza and peach crisp served with fair trade organic earl grey iced tea. Am I crazy for doing this?

This is the third time teaching my ethics of eating class and so the third time cooking. This was, by far, the smoothest time. In fact, the getting all the items together from my home kitchen to the kitchen in the department building was so easy that I thought for sure I had forgotten something really necessary.

Nevertheless, three students who had never made bread helped make the whole wheat pizza dough and many were surprised how quickly the yeast got to work and that bread dough rose. Seeing bread rise is impressive in itself on an ordinary day, but today was pretty warm and things really went fast.

We covered the pizza dough with crushed organic tomatoes, some salt, crushed red pepper flake, basil, oregano, some rice milk "cheese" (which did have a little milk protein in it, hence the close to vegan bit), onion, zucchini, pepper and black olives. Most of the ingredients were local and organic, some just organic, some just local.

Same goes for the ingredients in the crisp. Local organic peaches, local oats, organic local flour, organic brown sugar and cinnamon. Baked for 25 minutes the peaches released their juices and it was lovely even without adding any sugar to the fruit itself.

Everyone ate, laughed, talked. Everyone worked, too. Eating in community is one of my food values. And it is for many of my students who often lament that in their busy lives they usually eat alone. This is a class period I always look forward to. There is always something I learn about my students and some things they learn about me. This is experiential learning and really personal learning, too.

Plus, it seems a cruel joke to teach and ethics of eating class and not at least once eat as a class! A pizza party is a fitting part of such a class. We're getting to the end of the content for the class. Just three sessions left--one will be a video and a simulation about food access, another their paper presentations and the last the final exam. The end of the summer session and closing out another ethics of eating class is always bittersweet for me, since I love the topic so and learn so much myself. I am already planning new and different things for next summer's class and their pizza party.

As my Italian grandmother says, "Mange, mange!"