Food Program
Food is more than what’s on a plate — it is connection, culture, learning, and care.
At our Olivenhain location, we are excited to expand our curriculum to include healthy school lunches, hands-on cooking enrichment classes, and meaningful community outreach centered around nourishment and sustainability. Through this integrated food program, children experience the joy of preparing, sharing, and understanding wholesome meals as part of their everyday learning. To learn more about each aspect of our food program, see below.
School Lunch
Intention of the Program
To nourish and educate your children while simultaneously creating both a time and stress saver for parents in terms of the mental and financial load of meal planning and execution.
Thoughtful Details
When your child come to Kids by the Sea Olivenhain, they will be provided with a nutritious lunch, a morning snack, an optional afternoon snack, and water throughout the day. Our intention is to remove the daily pressure of packing meals while ensuring that children receive balanced, thoughtfully prepared food that supports their growth, energy, and learning.
In summary, you will simply drop your child off each morning knowing all their nutritional needs are being cared for each day.
Ingredients
We take ingredient sourcing very seriously. The quality of ingredients affects not only nutritional value but also flavor and children’s long-term relationship with food. Our goal is to be as seasonal as possible, sourcing organic ingredients whenever we can. We are especially excited to incorporate produce from our own garden as well as from local farms in our area. We see this as an extension of our curriculum—helping children build a connection to where their food comes from and fostering appreciation for fresh, whole ingredients.
Our school lunch program was designed in collaboration with Chef Eliza. For more details on her, visit www.elizathechef.com.
See a sample menu. Sample menu subject to change.
Enrichment Classes for Kids & Family After School Activities
Part of our food mission is to to educate our community and inspire our our families.
Cooking classes, especially family cooking classes, are an excellent way to accomplish this mission.
It has been proven that if kids are engaged with the cooking process, they are more willing to try new foods and be adventurous in their food choices.
We also know that being a caregiver and cooking all the meals each day can feel repetitive and exhausting. We hope that we can inspire our families to find new recipes and ways to enjoy cooking in their kitchen at home.
Community Outreach
Food insecurity is a large issue in not only our community but also in the world at large. We would like to address this by giving back to our community.
We envision partnerships with local farms to bring CSA boxes and artisan goods directly to our school community. And cultivating our own tiny farm on our Leucadia property to both serve as an educational venue as well as to be used in our food program.
As we expand this offering of our food program, we envision partnering with non-profits that are doing good: local farmers, shelters, and those that are figuring out how to eliminate food waste and get healthy food to those in need.
Our Team
Eliza Martin-Daly
Feast Fairy
Chef Eliza is a Food Network "Chopped" Champion, a professional chef, and an advocate for culinary literacy. Her adventures have taken her from New York City and Chicago to San Francisco and San Diego.
After years in the restaurant industry, she began working as a children's culinary educator in 2015. Since her first class with toddlers, she has been on a mission to reshape food education in schools and communities. She believes it is the responsibility of chefs to pass on the "love language" of food. She has worked with private and public schools, non-profits, and universities to teach children of all ages.
Currently, she teaches culinary classes for elementary and high school students in Oceanside and Vista, leads specialized classes at MiraCosta College, and loves spending time with the students at KBTS. Her 15 years in the culinary world bring a wealth of diverse food knowledge, and love for our own food heritage.
Erin Lane
Overseer of Little Meals & Big Intentions
Erin began her career in food at a very young age working in the front of the house at various restaurants. She quickly realized her passion for food and educating the public on good, sustainable food systems.
She worked at Slow Food Nation in San Francisco, where she worked alongside Alice Waters and Anya Fernald, promoting local artisans and those making a big difference in creating a more sustainable food system. She was able to travel to Italy to participate in Terra Madre, a global network and movement that brings together farmers, food producers, cooks, academics, and activists to promote good, clean, and fair food and protect local food traditions and biodiversity.
Once becoming a Mom, she took her knowledge of good and sustainable food and applied it to her own family life. She saw a big opportunity with children at the preschool age. They want to plant seeds in the garden, watch it grow, pick it, cut it up in the kitchen, create meals, and of course, taste it. With the development of the food program at Kids by the Sea, our hope is that we lay the foundation for kids to value the soil and where their food comes from, learn to cook, try new foods, be curious, and just enjoy good food and breaking bread together.