Okay. As long as we’re playing my kids eats this at school. Check this out: last weekend we went to my daughter’s kindergarten garden to water it (we’ve got an awesome charter school that requires parental involvement, hence various projects like “weekend garden watering”) and I kid you not, but the kindergartners were growing a thriving patch of, no joke, fava beans. I mean, I didn’t even learn what a fava bean was until I was in my late twenties. Maybe I saw it on Molto Mario or somesuch food networkesque episode. It seemed unreachable, some snobbish mediterranesque fantasy. But there, along with heirloom tomatoes, herbs, and the like in that little garden tended by little hands, were pods of favas of the scale and profound beauty of the best I’d seen in markets in Florence and Provence. Not that she eats favas for lunch everyday, but at least she knows what it takes to grow one from seed to snack. That’s way more than I got out of kindgergarten where I have vague recollections of our patron saint being Little Debby, as opposed to Alice Waters.
My son attends a “choice” school–public, admission by lottery–in Palo Alto, CA. One aspect of the magic of Ohlone School is that they have a farm. These little folks grow and eat a wide variety of foods including your aforementioned fava beans. Amazing what taste the little ones are developing, or at least being exposed to. Graham’s food preferences have influenced ours. More power to putting taste in the hands of kids.
Cheers!