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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Lynn Fredericks, FamilyCook Productions, 330 East 43rd Street Ste. 704, New York, NY 10017, 212 867-3929, lynn@FamilyCookProductions.com and mike Metallo, president, National Gardening Association, 1100 Dorset Street, South Burlington, VT 05403.

Multi-sensory food education has been shown to be especially effective to persuade children to be more open to accept new and healthy foods. For this reason, food gardening in schools has taken off over the last decade. Too often, however, the growing expertise does not coincide with instruction in food preparation and nutrition and vice versa. As part of its new philanthropic thrust, an organization of women leaders in culinary and hospitality, Les Dames d'Escoffier (LDEI) has partnered with the National Gardening Association (NGA), a 20 year veteran in school gardening, to bring this combined expertise to 26 communities where LDEI has chapters in the US and Canada. The new LDEI program, Green Tables: the LDEI Civic Agriculture & Garden Initiative offers capacity building to existing garden or farm-to-table efforts to improve community health & well-being while promoting stewardship of a healthy food system. LDEI chapters conducted fundraisers with program sponsor Chipotle Mexican Grill to cover administration, garden and culinary supplies. The culinarians and NGA gardening gurus assisted the schools to create multi-cultural ‘kitchen gardens' that could be harvested before school years' end, and in many cases, utilized by summer school programs until school resumed again in the fall. Preliminary results of the Adopt a School Garden impact shows substantial increase in child acceptance of healthy, garden fresh ingredients for both snacks and meals as well as an avid interest in food preparation.

Learning Objectives:

?Identify community organizations among which to leverage resources to address child nutrition
• Develop synergistic relationships across multiple constituencies around a common public health goal
• Develop a comprehensive garden to table curriculum and program to positively impact child nutrition

Keywords: Children's Health, Food and Nutrition

Related Web page: www.garden.org and www.greentable.org

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation