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FoodCorps is helping reverse the childhood obesity trend by teaching kids to fall in love with vegetables they’ve grown.
By Rebecca Katzman
One way to reverse childhood obesity? Teach a kid to fall in love with a vegetable simply because they grew it themselves.
FoodCorps, a grassroots farm-to-school program, does just this. About 182 AmeriCorps service members are sent to limited resource communities all around the country, focusing on school districts with a 50 percent or higher rate of free and reduced lunches. Service members teach classes in gardening and nutrition and hold taste demos and cooking lessons. The goal? Get the teachers, the parents and the whole community involved in healthy eating. And the service members themselves learn about agriculture and food cultivation in the process.
Each state, each service site, has a unique demographic with distinctive food-system issues. We chatted with four FoodCorps service members in four vastly different service sites across the U.S. to ask about their daily experiences, their most exciting projects and some of the challenges that they’ve encountered.
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