I am sitting in a hotel room in New Mexico watching C-SPAN waiting for dinner at a training so I can officially become a VISTA Supervisor. Michelle Obama is on giving a speech about how to keep kids from giving getting and staying fat. She is giving a shout out to community gardens and Will Allen. She committed to eliminate food deserts within 7 years. This will include bringing grocery stores to neighborhoods that currently do not have them (read North Waco and East Waco) or help convenience stores include more fruits and veggies. She promised that funding would be available to encourage better nutrition and more physical activity through The Partnership for a Healthier America.
Her initiative is called Let’s Move.
Check out the USDA Food Atlas to see where the governments perspective on how Americans are eating.
She is talking about making food healthier in schools but she is not talking about why the U.S. subsidize foods that make people fat but we have only done a little to encourage farmers in the U.S. to begin to grown more fruits and veggies.
Waco nonprofit works worldwide to promote food production and economic development...
Americans live in a land of plenty. Luscious greens, hearty meats, endless aisles of canned and boxed foods line the aisles of supermarkets. And most folks don’t give a second thought to how it gets there.
"People are definitely more and more detached from where their food comes from," says Matt Hess, education director for Waco-based World Hunger Relief, Inc. (WHRI). "Whether you’re a kid and your dad is a commodity farmer, or whether your dad is working on Wall Street, the food system is way more complicated than most of us understand."
The WHRI school garden clubs have been full of life and activity this year. I work primarily with the elementary schools, other farmers work with our 3 middle schools, and have had the pleasure of observing the young gardeners antics. Here are a few of my favorite tales of small gardeners....
We have kept a few things growing in the school gardens through the winter, primarily lettuces, carrots and onions, but mostly we are planning for the spring. One cold day at Doris Miller we took a seed catalogue so that the students could select which plants they wanted for their garden. We are trying to emphasize student ownership of the gardens and saw this as another way to include them in an important decision process. Students took turns gathering around the catalogue and coming to a consensus on seed varieties. Some students made their selections based on pictures while others insisted that I read through the descriptions of each variety. The greatest debate came in the melon section when a group of boys could not decide between the largest watermelon variety and one that boasted sweetness. The argument was settled when J proclaimed "bigger doesn't mean it tastes good."
The West Ave. Elementary Garden Club also been doing a lot of planning and dreaming about the spring. On the last day of the fall semester before Christmas we took the kids a pecan pie, made of course from WHRI pecans, and fair trade hot chocolate from the Village Store. We all enjoyed this treat together over a conversation about what they wanted to plant this spring. Many of the suggestions came from fruits and things that the students liked to eat, which was great. However we were even more excited when individual students made suggestions from things that they had experience planting. One student, E, told the group about how she had planted sunflowers at her home and had even harvested and either eaten or replanted the seeds. I asked E if she would lead Garden Club in planting and harvesting sunflowers and she enthusiatically agreed. We see gardening as an avenue for empowerment and leadership in our students and you could see on E's face that she felt these effects.
