As teachers convene this week to welcome students back next week, there will inevitably be “what did you do this summer” questions. For a handful of Saint Paul Public Schools teachers, this answer is quite extraordinary.

Harding High School’s Allison Zaccardi and Adrienne Anderson were two of six Saint Paul Fund for Teachers Fellows. As part of this award, they got to take an educational trip that will ultimately help their students. Their grant took them to Italy - they’d been to Paris and Barcelona in the past as part of this program.

Both Zaccardi and Anderson teach consumer sciences. One of their main focuses of this trip was sustainability.

The pair went on a cheese tour north of Bologna, on a five generation family farm. “We looked at these traditional food production methods, and how these family farms are still maintaining tradition, and incorporating sustainability into their processes,” Zaccardi explained. As family farms they put a lot of care into their animals and products to make sure they wind up with a business that sustains.”

According to Zaccardi, the dairy cows only produce seven gallons per day - unlike 20 here in the United States. We focus a lot on breeding and genetics for high milk production here, but not in Italy. 

“This particular farm had seven breeds mixed together,” she said. “There’s no planned breeding program. The more mixed the cattle are, the less illness they have and the more resistant they are. 

That cheese tour though? The ricotta was just a couple hours from production. Cheeses up to 80 months old.

They both plan on bringing their learnings back to their students on the east side of St. Paul.

“Part of our grant is about maintenance of culture,” Anderson said. “Although that seems obvious, that’s something we want to stress that importance to our kids. A lot of them are maybe not valuing or understanding how important it is to know how your mom or dad or grandma or grandpa made that. Can you write it down, can you maintain the tradition instead of taking it for granted.”

Among their other visits were a university in Bologna with a sustainable agriculture production culinary program that includes a public restaurant; an institute in Rome started by Alice Waters, the chef who started the farm-to-table movement; an organic teaching farm and vineyard. Oh, and plenty of pizza.

“I think the biggest goal for me is really helping our students recognize the whole system,” Zaccardi said. “When we’re eating our food, do we understand the impact it has on our planet, on our labor force, and on ourselves and our own health? We have to make sure kids know how food is made, and the benefits of maintaining our traditional food and honoring those traditions. Our food connects us to our identities. “

While you may not think of a great similarity between Italy and St. Paul, Anderson thinks their diversities connect them.

“If you’re in Milan you get risotto, you get pizza in Naples, seafood in Sicily,” she said. “That’s definitely something we can talk about and use in our labs. We have an extremely diverse population of students. That was interesting…you can get pasta and pizza anywhere, but it may not be the same in every region and city.”