Titan Terrace uses in school herbs

Everyone who eats at 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 they’re are grown from within the very doors of this school.

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 stand 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 added to houseplants and to the aquariums.

Underneath and directly connected to growbeds 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 a usuable 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, who 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 Foods program use the herbs for the recipes they make in the Titan Terrace,” Ms. Morgan, an occupational therapist in the POHI program, said.

She had approached the Foods teacher about establishing this program, allowing the kitchen to use all these organic products for their recipes, while giving the work program the opportunity students in 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.”

The foods teachers are extremely satisfied with the results of their relationship. “With the new system, we’ve been able to get ingredients that were usually too expensive,” Ms. Adam, one of the foods teachers, said.

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 are 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 a representation of the unity that our school is home to, and the great things that unity can produce.

Mr. S                                               Mason Kaiser

    Angela Dzielski                                                                              

Kristy Healy