IN THE CLASSROOM:Food, jazz merge

As far as Lowell Bernstein is concerned, food can be tied into almost any academic subject. Even swing.

Bernstein, who visited Victoria Elementary School last week, runs food preparation workshops at schools around Southern California. The name of his presentation is Jazz Kidchen — with the “d” in “Kidchen” being intentional — and as he explained to fifth-graders at the start of class on Thursday, there’s a similarity between whipping up an open-face sandwich and riffing on a theme by John Coltrane.

“Do any of you know what improvisation is?” he asked teacher Joe Norris’ class as it assembled in the Victoria multipurpose room.

“Improvisation is when you kind of change something,” answered Hailey Bond, 10. “You improve it.”

For the next hour and a half, Victoria’s young chefs did quite a bit of improvising, as Bernstein provided them with pita bread and a number of ingredients — including cream cheese, sliced olives and fresh dill — that they used to construct edible portraits.

Geoff Ianniello, the project coordinator for the Newport-Mesa Unified School District’s Network for a Healthy California program, said Victoria won a visit from Bernstein because it worked nutrition so tightly into its core curriculum. Throughout the year, Ianniello said, teachers had students taste food during science projects and learn about diets at different points in history.

Bernstein touched on a number of subjects during his presentation, handing out worksheets on pita bread’s country of origin — Italy — and having the students use math measurements to sketch their portraits on paper. There was ample room, however, for students to let their imaginations run wild. Leah Blanks, 11, did a portrait of herself and used shredded carrots for freckles.

James Espeleta, 10, created a bulldog’s face with his ingredients, using red pepper slivers for horns and sliced olives for nostrils. The character, he said, was his own creation.

“I made him up in a comic book I wrote,” he said.