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In the Classroom, Madison Students Get a Taste of Local Veggies
By Shannon Henry —
There is something truly powerful about seeing a kindergartner happily snacking on a carrot stick that until recently was growing in a local farmer’s garden.
These past three weeks, my daughter’s K-2 school, Franklin Elementary, in Madison, WI, has been running a pilot classroom snack program with Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch. The first week, we handed out bags of fresh carrot sticks, which I swear tasted sweeter and fresher than the mini-carrots we’ve come to rely on. The following weeks offered jicama and sweet potato sticks, also from local growers.
I’ve been working with a group of parents to improve the lunches in our public schools, and we decided that students should be learning about their snacks, not just eating them. Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch provided a handout on the local history of the particular carrots the kids were eating, so each teacher had an opportunity to make snack part of the lesson while the kids were munching.
To most of these children, it’s just a good snack. But to me, it’s hope that the kids will grow up healthy and interested in fresh, real foods, and give some thought to where food comes from. I like that we gave them a delicious good-for-you snack, and I hope the results of the pilot mean we’ll be offering such goodies all next year.
For more information on Wisconsin Home Grown Lunch, go to http://reapfoodgroup.org/farmtoschool/snack.shtml
May 22nd, 2009 at 9:02 am
This is great! My daughter is a 1st grader at Franklin and she told me about this. She loved the jicama and sweet potato sticks. Re: the sweet potato sticks, are they raw or dried or what? I would like to make them for her. Do you know if this will continue in the fall?
May 27th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
In our household, we gave up baby carrots long ago… and I, too, remember being delightfully surprised by the sweetness, the crispness of the fresh carrot. We never looked back.