Salad Bar Bolsters Bridgehampton's 'Edible Schoolyard' Project

is taking steps to improve the health of its students and joining in a national diet and nutrition initiative by adding a salad bar to its cafeteria and growing its own vegetables on school grounds throughout the year.

Judiann Carmack-Fayyaz, an environmental design teacher at the school, is also the head of the East End chapter of Slow Food International, an organization that aims to promote healthy foods of local provenance. As such, she joined former chef Ann Cooper to combine the latter’s “Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools” campaign with Bridgehampton’s 3-year-old Edible Schoolyard project.

“My children went to the Ross School, and the food there was phenomenal,” Carmack-Fayyez explained. “So I wanted to introduce the same thing here.”

Bridgehampton School’s small size, Carmack-Fayyaz said, makes it difficult to produce an effective food program due to labor costs and lack of physical space, so a salad bar “made the most sense.” The school district received a salad bar grant recently from Cooper’s organization, which is affiliated with First Lady Michelle Obama’s national “Let’s Move” children’s health initiative. Carmack-Fayyez said that child health risks, such as obesity and diabetes, are major causes for concern.

In addition to being a founding partner in the “Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools” campaign, which aims to provide 6,000 salad bars to schools over three years, Cooper is the founder of Food, Family, Farming Foundation, a nonprofit “created to change the food system in the U.S. to an ecologically sound, sustainable model,” according to its website.

The foodstuffs to be purveyed at the new Bridgehampton School salad bar will be grown right behind the school administration building in a 1,080-square-foot greenhouse completed last fall, four cold frames and a 3,000-square-foot outdoor garden, all Edible Schoolyard efforts. Carmack-Fayyaz said the field will be planted in the spring to grow Asian greens, lettuces, salad turnips, radishes and other vegetables. Carrots as well as arugala and mache lettuces currently grow in the nearby cold frames, and various seed plants are cultivated in the greenhouse, which is constantly heated at 40 degrees, but can rise to 70 degrees during the winter with the benefit of sunlight.

Carmack-Fayyez said she and her colleagues are very enthusiastic about Bridgehampton School’s recent nutritional endeavors and added that the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the greenhouse will be held on March 26 from noon to 3 p.m.

“We’re really excited,” she said. “It’s all happening back there this spring. It’s going to be great.”