Everyone who eats at the Warren Woods Tower (WWT) student-run restaurant, the Titan Terrace, has likely had a salad or a hint of basil to flavor their dishes. However, what those consuming this delicious food may not know is that some of these products are grown from within the doors of the school.
The Warren Woods Tower Career Technical Education (CTE) Culinary Arts and Hospitality program has teamed up with a pre-vocational class to provide organic and fresh vegetables and herbs for the student run restaurant, the Titan Terrace.
Immediately across from the kitchen is the prevocational classroom, a class run by the Special Education group that does various tasks that impact many areas of the school, like designing school awards and recycling paper.
On one side of the room stands several boxes. In those boxes are food scraps from the Titan Terrace covering the top. Underneath the scraps are a great amount of earthworms, squirming around in the soil they created by feeding on them. The dirt they make is then added to houseplants and to the aquariums.
Underneath and directly connected to grow beds next to these boxes are several fish tanks filled with tilapia, each tank holding several different sizes of the fish, varying from large to small. The plants in the garden and fish in the tanks are living dependently off one another, the fish exchanging the ammonia that is converted to useable nitrogen for the plants.
The connection between the communities allows the fish to live, and the plants to continue growing. Throughout all of this, scraps of food are brought to the boxes of worms, which create more soil to allow more plants to grow, while the plants grown are brought over to the kitchen to be used as ingredients.
“The students in the Foods and Hospitality program use the herbs for the recipes they make in the Titan Terrace,” Ms. Morgan, an occupational therapist in the POHI program, said.
The Titan Terrace uses these organic products for their recipes, while giving the work program the opportunity for students to learn about recycling and biological studies. “The system is basically a real life example of the Nitrogen cycle,” Ms. Morgan said, “so there is a scientific aspect to it as well.”
“We are extremely satisfied with the results of our perfect team. With the new system, we’ve been able to get ingredients that were usually too expensive,” Ms. Adams and Mr. Silwanowicz shared, both being Foods and Hospitality teachers.
The teacher and cooks aren’t the only ones who are satisfied with the results of this cross-curricular program. After all, a program dedicated to bettering the quality of food would mean nothing if the improvements didn’t satisfy the customers paying for and eating the dishes served with these new ingredients.
However, that is not something that this establishment need worry themselves about, as the reception has been very positive from the patrons of the establishment. “The salads are good and they’re fresh” said Autumn Bryant ’14. With this improvement, customers are eating better salads, along with all dishes with vegetables.
With the new exchange between classes, the Titan Terrace has been able to upgrade from iceberg lettuce to romaine lettuce, and have greater access to garnishes like basil and parsley, and is thus able to improve the quality of the food that they sell at the restaurant.
So whenever you eat at the Titan Terrace, remember that the improved recipes you are enjoying are not just food, but an embodiment of the power of school unity and what it can produce. The Titan Terrace is open most school days and is open to public access.
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