Feed Our Soul: Improving the Food System Through CEA Education
April 15, 2025 After spending 15 years as a junior chef in the hospitality industry, Adrienne Wilson of Los Angeles discovered a passion for food and inspiration to change the back end of the food supply chain. “I started getting concerned about where our food comes from,” she says. “How does it get from point A to point B? Our food system is broken, and we need to find a way to make hyper-local food available to everyone.”
Urban farming, she believes, is the solution she was looking for. Wilson founded Feed Our Soul, a nonprofit organization committed to bringing local produce to food desert neighborhoods, in 2019.
Starting in Schools
It began with the installation of hydroponic towers in schools, churches, and other community spaces in L.A. She held weekly harvests, and anyone in the community could take leafy greens from the gardens. During one of her harvest days at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif., a teacher approached her about teaching a gardening class.
“I had never taught a gardening class or even a curriculum before,” she says. “It started off as a club during lunch and after school. It took off from there, and we now have a 12-week curriculum to teach students and young adults how to grow and cook their own food.”
Growing food is one thing, Wilson notes, but knowing what to do with it post-harvest is another.
“A big thing that was missing is teaching people how to cook with food they’re connected to and that is culturally relevant to them,” she says. “My background in hospitality and recipe-building made it easy for me to bring growing and cooking together.”
The Feed Our Soul curriculum, also known as the Community Health Impact Program (CHIP), is broken into three modules: Environmental science, nutritional literacy, and food entrepreneurship. Here’s what Wilson expects students to learn in each one:
- Environmental science: What a plant needs in order to grow.
- Nutritional literacy: Processed food ingredients and how to read the labels on food packaging.
- Food entrepreneurship: The challenges urban communities face regarding food and how to contribute to the food space.
The CHIP program is currently used at Woodrow Wilson High School and Hyde Park Elementary School in the Hyde Park neighborhood, so it has been tailored to meet the needs of both elementary and high school students.
Branching Outside of Los Angeles
One of Wilson’s long-term goals is to digitize Feed Our Soul’s curriculum to reach students in other parts of the country that are most affected by food deserts.
“I would love for our materials to be available for everyone,” she says, “especially in places where young Black and Brown students don’t know anything about food and the accessibility issues around it.”
By having a digital curriculum that’s easily accessible, Wilson also aims to ease the burden many teachers across the U.S. face as fewer resources become available. “Ultimately, I want to work on a government level to give teachers access to this curriculum pretty easily. I think digitizing it would be the next step,” she says.
The Future of Feed Our Soul
Wilson believes that CEA is essential to the future of the food system. And what better way to start shaping the future than with the next generation of growers and farmers?
“I want people to recognize the importance of CEA,” she says. “We’re not going to take away traditional farms and orchards. But CEA gives us additional tools to build a food ecosystem where we don’t have to rely on corporations to provide us with very processed food.”