Be Healthy
Cooking and Wellness
A breaking story on the news recently noted that despite the fact that most Americans know they should be eating fruit and vegetables, they aren’t! These are some shocking statistics from the Center for Disease Control:
- Only 13% of Americans eat the recommended amount of fruit daily.
- Only 9% of Americans eat the recommended amount of vegetables daily. (a high percentage of these people count French fries as their vegetable intake.)
What about you?
Teaching people how to grow, prep, cook, preserve, eat and enjoy fresh produce is literally at the root of our work. Eating fresh veggies and fruit is one of the most powerful daily habits we can do to impacts our health and prevent the most prevalent diseases. Let’s not underestimate the healing potential of changing people’s relationship with and their perception of fresh produce. We are teaching about the leading causes of health. We want more people to eat and love delicious, nutritious, seasonal organically grown produce from Soil Born, local farms, restaurants, schools, and their own backyards. Imagine the fiscal impact on health care costs if even 50% of people changed their eating habits to include a bit more produce, not to mention the quality of life.
Our Eat Your Veggies initiative teaches people to eat healthy, local food through mobile cooking demonstrations, food tasting, recipes, nutrition information, food access and incentives to buy local produce. The project focuses on reaching out to residents in their own neighborhoods, centers, and schools. We promote farm activities, farm stand hours and available produce to local residents and provide mobile cooking demonstrations, food samples, recipes and nutrition education at community centers and events. Through incentives such as frequent shopper cards and coupons we encourage people to visit our farm stand, where they can see a cooking demo, taste a healthy, simple recipe and then shop for fresh produce to take home.
True healthcare reform starts in your kitchen, not in Washington. ~Anonymous
Key Initiatives
Something to Crow About
- Increased participation by neighbors at farm events, including weekly Farmstands and cooking demonstrations
- The Farmstand accepts EBT, allowing more low-income neighbors access to local, fresh fruits and vegetables
- Many people attending our cooking demonstrations verbally expressed their interest and appreciation to try new recipes
- Hundreds of students from neighboring schools who participated in our Discovery field trip program went home with new experiences, tastes, and promotional materials.
