The Talcott cooking class, a year of growing celebrated

What HVP celebrated

By September 2025, Talcott had spent a full year running an HVP hydroponic system in Mrs. Bahena’s fifth-grade classroom, cycling through greens, herbs, radishes, and edible flowers as students learned to seed, maintain, harvest, and replant on their own. This day was the capstone event: a full cooking class built around the kinds of produce they had been growing, brought together with community partners.

How the day ran

HVP partnered with the Chicago Student Refugee Coalition to bring the event to Talcott, and The Evolved Network and Chef Sebastian White came in to lead a live cooking demonstration. Chef Sebastian worked with the students to prep and plate seasonal poached radishes with a fresh herb relish. Registered nutritionist Lara Field ran a parallel nutrition-education session, walking the class through the plate they were building and what each component was doing for their bodies.

Students took turns at the cutting board, the stovetop, and the nutrition worksheet. The class shared the finished dish together, and HVP partnered with Montrose Food Mart to distribute more than 100 bags of fresh produce to families at the end of the day.

Why Talcott

Talcott, a Chicago Public school in West Town, is one of HVP’s newer partners, onboarded in 2025. The cooking class brought together the kinds of partners HVP relies on: a community organization, a professional chef, a credentialed nutritionist, and a local grocer making produce distribution possible.

The result was a single afternoon that moved through every part of HVP’s model: the system, the curriculum, the culinary workshop, and the family distribution. A condensed version of an entire school year of programming, anchored by the students who had actually grown the food.