Local Hero

We get to rub elbows with many great people on a daily basis, so we thought this would be a great opportunity to showcase local community members that strive for good causes such as teachers, organic farmers, or businesses we like to support.

Hank Stelzl
Hank is the garden rotation teacher and garden coordinator at Paul Ecke Central School in Encinitas and one of the hardest working, most dedicated people we have ever met. He has been working in restaurants since the age of 15 and helping his mom in the kitchen at home since the age of 10. He has an extremely impressive resume including working for chefs such as Charlie Trotter, Julia Child, and Roy Yamaguchi. You can find him working the edible garden at PEC 7 days a week. At night he works at West Steak and Seafood, where he also receives about 40 lbs of food waste per week to use as compost at the garden, which is turned into fertile soil. He is passionate about teaching kids sustainability of food through science and agriculture. Hank is adamant about being able to get children out of the classroom and into the garden where they can apply knowledge that they have learned in science class to real life hands-on interaction.

One of his inspirations to do this was Alice Waters’ Edible School Yard Project, which is based on the book she wrote called Edible Schoolyard. In this book, Alice talks about connecting people with their food sources—much like we were a hundred years ago—by having urban gardens and schoolyard gardens. She started helping children by building schoolyard gardens, which in turn can nourish them and give them hands-on learning by using their own bodies and touching, tasting, and smelling to educate their senses as well. This book has much more information than we are able to speak of, but we recommend everyone to check it out. The website for the Edible Schoolyard Project iswww.edibleschoolyard.org.

Hank also understands that life can be hectic nowadays and that we do “not live in a 9–5 world” anymore, so many families are usually stuck grabbing fast food or unhealthy processed food, having no idea where it came from. By teaching kids how to grow their own food, it creates an interaction—and if you can have them help out in the kitchen preparing food or planning the menu, they will most certainly want to eat the delicious creations. He accepts the challenge of trying to get families back to the table together at least 2–3 days a week and believes everyone should know where their food comes from. Hank says that “kids are the future” and we must nourish them through knowledge and good wholesome food.

Hank would eventually love to produce enough food at the garden to incorporate into the school lunch program and even enough for local chefs, but is taking it one step at a time by teaching the kids about science and sustainability. He says, “If you teach them how to grow it, and help cook it, there is no doubt they will love to eat it”. He is an extremely dedicated individual motivated by a good cause so we expect to see exceptional things from him in the future and we will be following up with him from time to time. He may be contacted by email at hstelzl@eusd.net and the website for the school garden is www.schoolasagarden.org