In the second grade classroom where I teach, I saw the face of hunger in Paterson, New Jersey drawn in crayon on the “my favorite meal” worksheet I handed out. “Draw a meal that’s special to you or your family,” I explained, “then label each food group.”

My students had breezed through the food groups activity I had begun with, eagerly sorting broccoli, yogurt, and bread into the categories on the MyPlate template. But when I asked them to do the same with a meal they eat at home, they were stumped, and to be fair, so was I. “Miss Amanda, what food group do marshmallows go in?” One student asked, “Are Oreos a grain? What about Takis?” I stammered, not sure how to explain to my students that their favorite foods didn’t have a place on the MyPlate diagram.

This trend was further exemplified in the cafeteria. Children buzz about the room, exchanging Takis for Doritos, Cheetos for Tostitos like cryptocurrency traders. These heavily processed snacks, devoid of any real nutritional value, are woven into the fabric of cafeteria culture at my school. Hunger, I found, doesn’t always look like starving children desperate for a handful of rice. It also looks like children who can list off every flavor of their favorite brand of chips but have never tasted a carrot.

I was determined to convince my second-grade students that vegetables were just as cool as fidget spinners or slime.

I knew that as a FoodCorps AmeriCorps service member, I was charged with not only connecting kids with healthy food in schools, but also building a “schoolwide culture of health.” I was determined to convince my second-grade students that vegetables were just as cool as fidget spinners or slime. So we chopped up spinach in science class and planted peas, tomatoes, and cabbages in the school garden. Truthfully, due in large part to the innate enthusiasm that young children have, this part of my service has been relatively easy. My students have gone from scoffing at salad and, in one case, literally gagging upon tasting a sprig of parsley, to eagerly slurping kale smoothies and asking for seconds of raw broccoli. I have seen firsthand how nutrition education has improved my students’ attitudes towards healthy eating and their willingness to taste new foods.

But as the year has gone on I’ve realized that my students’ hunger, and their preference for unhealthy food, isn’t solely due to the trendiness of junk food at school. It’s also a result of their environment. Every day as I drive down the hill away from the school, I watch a sea of students in blue polos and khakis stream into the nearby bodegas, whose outer walls are adorned with colorful food advertisements, and emerge with bags of chips. These foods aren’t just the norm in my school; they’re also the norm in Paterson. I started to realize that building a schoolwide culture of health doesn’t mean assembling something new. It also means deconstructing an existing culture that has been shaped not only within the school’s walls, but in the kids’ homes, in the stores they shop in, and in their interactions with each other.

Furthermore, as I spoke to more people from Paterson—people affected by and working to alleviate hunger in the city—my understanding of what a culture of health meant became increasingly complex. And as I continued looking for the sources of these issues, I found that my scope extended almost infinitely outward. My school’s culture isn’t just about the cafeteria trends or the advertisements on nearby bodegas. It’s also about the wages my students’ parents are paid. Rent and taxes in North Jersey are some of the highest in the country, yet many of my students’ parents are paid insufficient wages to support a family. And it’s also shaped by national policies like immigration laws. Some Paterson residents hesitate to look into available services because they fear being detained by ICE. Hunger doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s not a result of random traits of a community. Hunger is structural, bound up with our country’s long history of racial and socioeconomic discrimination. It is staggeringly complex, and it is also gravely urgent. One in three children in the U.S. is on track to develop type-2 diabetes, and for students of color—like most children in Paterson—it’s one in two.

Hunger doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s not a result of random traits of a community. Hunger is structural, bound up with our country’s long history of racial and socioeconomic discrimination. It is staggeringly complex, and it is also gravely urgent.

FoodCorps has had visible impacts on my students. Seeing them gravitate towards green beans and lettuce over candy and potato chips makes me hopeful that in FoodCorps classrooms, our children may defy the statistics that loom over them. But it is just one piece in a complex web of steps that must be taken to address hunger in Paterson and in the United States. Before we can build a culture of health, we must disassemble the culture of inequity and racism that perpetuates hunger. This structure is so complex and so robust that it won’t happen overnight. I hope to see top-down policy solutions that destroy this structure like a wrecking ball. But given our current political climate, these solutions do not seem imminent. Fortunately, there are multiple ways to destabilize a building. We need to keep pushing for top-down solutions. But in the meantime, FoodCorps service members are kneeling at the building’s foundation, removing one screw at a time through nutrition education, school gardens, and supporting a healthy cafeteria culture. Furthermore, the complexity of hunger means that there are many ways one can get involved. Whether you choose to fight for fair wages in your community, for humane immigration policies, or for healthy corner stores, you can help, too. If we all start working in our own communities to disassemble this structure from the bottom, eventually it will fall. And once it does, we can begin building a more equitable, more inclusive culture of health from the ground up.

FoodCorps AmeriCorps Service Member Amanda Greenlee won the 2018 FoodCorps Victory Growers Award “for a compelling account of hunger and food insecurity,” winning a $5,000 prize for her service site, United Way of Passaic County in Paterson, NJ. The award, sponsored by C&S Wholesale Grocers, highlights that many children struggle with hunger and food insecurity, and that the food they receive at school is the most important meal they will get all day.

The post To Build a Culture of Health, First Dismantle Inequity appeared first on FoodCorps.

This morning, sitting comfortably in front of a class of first graders seated cross-legged on the rug, I asked them to use one word to describe how they were feeling that day. Hands shot into the air. “I feel good,” said one student. “Happy,” said another.

I pointed, smiling, to a squirming student. “Can you tell us how you feel today?”

“Hungry,” he said.

In the community of East Boston, where I live and serve, his response isn’t unique. Affectionately called “Eastie,” my neighborhood looks different from others in Boston. At one of the schools I serve, nearly 90% of the students are Hispanic; in the city of Boston as a whole, the same population is just 19%. The great majority of my students speak a first language other than English. They come from a number of different countries: El Salvador, Colombia, Puerto Rico, and Vietnam, among others.

This rich diversity of cultures isn’t the only thing that sets East Boston apart from the rest of the city. Of Boston’s six neighborhoods, it’s considered the most extreme food desert, with the lowest number of grocery stores per capita in the city. Last year’s district profile classified nearly 95% of my students as high-need. Two-thirds of those students are economically disadvantaged, eligible for SNAP benefits or transitional assistance.

These are powerful numbers, but I am moved to serve by what I see. Thanks to a particularly fierce Boston winter, our school year was dotted with snow days. Each time a cancellation was announced, I noticed students’ distress, rather than glee. “Their families rely on school meals,” a teacher told me. “They might not know if they get to eat tomorrow.”

In comparison to the rest of the city, students and their families in East Boston have reduced access to fresh food, and many are economically disadvantaged. It is surely no coincidence that 28% of adults living in East Boston are obese, significantly greater than the Boston average. And so a question that I, like many other FoodCorps AmeriCorps service members, grapple with each day is this: what can I do? What is the role of FoodCorps in addressing inequities like these? Can planting seeds and pickling classroom carrots really matter in the fight to protect the health and wellness of our students?

Thanks to a particularly fierce Boston winter, our school year was dotted with snow days. Each time a cancellation was announced, I noticed students’ distress, rather than glee. “Their families rely on school meals,” a teacher told me. “They might not know if they get to eat tomorrow.”

The answer is, unequivocally: it can, and it does. Although the natural tendency is to blame a lack of grocery stores in areas like East Boston for health disparities, recent studies show that differences in the way people eat aren’t due to where they live. In fact, across the United States, improving neighborhood access to high-quality grocery stores is responsible for just 5% of the difference in nutritional choices between high-income and low-income families. Instead, it’s unequal access to education—particularly food and nutrition education—that accounts for most of that disparity. In short, children in communities like East Boston—that is, those facing higher rates of food insecurity and diet-related disease—don’t need more grocery stores. They need access to the same educational opportunities as their higher-income peers.

Teaching children to grow and prepare their own food is empowering. Teaching them that these things can be done within their own neighborhoods, with their families, is even more important.

And they need it now more than ever. Communities like East Boston are facing an administration that has cut SNAP funding by nearly $213 billion over the next ten years, with a proposed replacement of pre-assembled packages of shelf-stable goods delivered to families’ doorsteps. The implication for my students is that the complex network of factors that shape their food choices—their home countries, their cultures, their personal tastes—does not matter.

Teaching children to grow and prepare their own food is empowering. Teaching them that these things can be done within their own neighborhoods, with their families, is even more important. Food literacy and nutrition education is a proven way to combat the reduced academic performance and poor emotional health caused by hunger and diet-related disease in low-resource areas. To be just, and to be sustainable, that education must be provided in partnership with communities.

What does that mean? FoodCorps, as an organization, has been exploring that question for the past eight years—and there remains work to be done. It means selecting, as often as possible, staff and service members that reflect the communities they serve. It means preparing service members to be collaborators, not heroes, and expecting service to be rewarding, not glamorous. It means asking ourselves, at every turn, which voices are missing from the conversation, and how we can ensure they are included. And, always, it means listening to our students. Our questions—about their cultures, their feelings, their favorite foods—open the door to a world of understanding and growth.

“I’m hungry,” answered one of my first graders, just this morning. FoodCorps, and its partners in communities across the country, can change that story.

FoodCorps AmeriCorps Service Member Ellie Doyle was a runner-up in the 2018 FoodCorps Victory Growers Award “for a compelling account of hunger and food insecurity,” winning a $1,000 prize for her service site, Boston Public Schools in Boston, MA. The award, sponsored by C&S Wholesale Grocers, highlights that many children struggle with hunger and food insecurity, and that the food they receive at school is the most important meal they will get all day.

The post The Power of Nutrition Education appeared first on FoodCorps.

It’s a cooking day in late spring in the food justice elective I co-teach as a FoodCorps AmeriCorps service member at Lowell Career Academy. We’re cooking up a vegetable stir fry on a hot plate in the classroom. Some students are chopping garlic scapes and snap peas freshly picked from our garden, while others stir together soy sauce, rice vinegar, and honey for a sauce. Soon the smell of garlic and ginger frying begins to fill the room. Students from another class lean their heads through the open door and ask, “What’s cooking today?”

Students in my class demonstrate their hunger in different ways. Some students are direct, sharing statements like, “I’ve only had a bag of chips since yesterday.” Others are more subtle. Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish hunger from its myriad effects. A student may be calorically full, having eaten a stream of white bread and hot Cheetos since I last saw him, but still show signs of hunger—distraction and a spike in energy falling to morose depletion. I see in so many students a desire for nourishment. This nourishment can certainly come from healthy, fresh food that provides sustained energy and brain development. But it must also come from being in community around such food.

A student may be calorically full, having eaten a stream of white bread and hot Cheetos since I last saw him, but still show signs of hunger—distraction and a spike in energy falling to morose depletion.

If you think about your favorite food, you probably have some happy and loving memories tied to it. Someone you loved gave it to you when you were upset or it’s a food you frequently share with close friends. Often, we love certain foods because they remind us of times where we have felt belonging, like we are part of a community.

During my time in schools, I’ve so often seen students punished for effects of hunger such as distraction, irritability, or aggression. My goal as a FoodCorps service member this year was to use food as a way to welcome students into community. During cooking classes, we listen to students’ favorite songs, we talk about our pets, our families, and our dreams for Lowell. Before we sit down to eat our food family-style, we share one thing we’re grateful for. It’s in one of those indescribable moments where we’re taking our first bite of saucy stir-fried snap peas that we’ve grown ourselves, laughing about a story a student is sharing, with the sun shining through the window to make the room a tinge brighter that I hope that my students have not just satisfied their hunger but also found nourishment in our shared community.

No matter how healthy the food on their lunch plate is, for students to feel nourished, they must be in a space where they feel as though they are welcome and understood.

Nourishing students through healthy food in warm community is possible at every school. Yet, I know too well through a year of FoodCorps service that we’re not there yet. The following are three recommendations that would bring my service site, a school where I teach teenagers gardening and cooking and about healthy eating, closer to this goal.

The first is a designated space to cook. Since my site is a satellite school with no scratch kitchen, I made do by carrying a kitchen into the classroom in bins filled with hotplates, cutting-boards, utensils, and ingredients. A fully-equipped kitchen is a necessary step in allowing students to prepare nourishing food in community.

Nourishing students through healthy food in warm community is possible at every school.

The second is funding for professional development for all adults responsible for monitoring the cafeteria to be trained in healing, culturally-responsive behavior management. No matter how healthy the food on their lunch plate is, for students to feel nourished, they must be in a space where they feel as though they are welcome and understood.

Finally, video equipment would have helped me to capture these stories of nourishment. Yes, students are starting to prefer more vegetables, but this change in preference is only the beginning of a much larger story. I believe their preferences are changing because they associate fresh, healthy food with memories of that intangible, human, soul heartbeat connection of cooking and eating in community.

It’s within this apparatus of community that students feel safe enough to take risks around their food choices. These risks are necessary starting point for changes in preference. These changes are what I hope for and know we can achieve for all of our students at my service site and beyond.

FoodCorps AmeriCorps Service Member Zoe Flavin was a runner-up in the 2018 FoodCorps Victory Growers Award “for a compelling account of hunger and food insecurity,” winning a $1,000 prize for her service site, Mill City Grows in Lowell, MA. The award, sponsored by C&S Wholesale Grocers, highlights that many children struggle with hunger and food insecurity, and that the food they receive at school is the most important meal they will get all day.

The post Alleviating Hunger Through Community appeared first on FoodCorps.

WHOLESALE GROCERY SUPPLIER TO SUPPORT HUNGER ALLEVIATION EFFORTS IN SCHOOLS

Keene, NH—In honor of National Hunger Action month, FoodCorps and C&S Wholesale Grocers are announcing the winner and runners-up of an essay contest aimed at raising awareness of hunger in schools. The Victory Growers Award contest, open to all 225 FoodCorps service members, prompted writers to share stories of childhood hunger at their service sites and persuade readers to take action. C&S is proud to award the winner’s school with $5,000 toward food education programs. The schools of the two runners-up will each receive $1,000.

Lauren Burke’s winning essay tells the story of hunger on a Hopi reservation in Arizona, where she serves as a FoodCorps service member. Child hunger and food insecurity rates are up to twice as high on Native American reservations than they are in the rest of the country, and Burke argues for a culturally inclusive approach to nutrition education as a solution to hunger. “[Nutrition education programs] must strive not only to serve native communities, but to allow those communities to construct the programming of the future,” writes Burke.

Two runners-up were named. Mary Grace Stoneking, serving in Van Buren, AR, wrote an essay describing the impact of chronic hunger on a child’s education and encourages readers to invest in food education programs. Carly Wyman, serving in Pahoa, HI, submitted an essay discussing the unique challenges of Hawai’i’s predominantly imported food system and argues that hands-on food education is an effective way to address childhood hunger. The essays and photos of the award winners are available at foodcorps.org/stories.

FoodCorps is a national service program that connects kids to healthy food in schools. Its team of AmeriCorps leaders serves in high-need schools to make sure students learn what healthy food is, fall in love with it, and eat it every day. C&S Wholesale Grocers has supported FoodCorps since 2014. In addition to the Victory Grower’s Award, C&S connects FoodCorps to education resources and has partnered with FoodCorps to grow knowledge of healthy food for students by placing service members near its warehouse locations.

About C&S Wholesale Grocers, Inc.

C&S Wholesale Grocers, Inc., based in Keene, NH, is the largest wholesale grocery supply company in the U.S. and the industry leader in supply chain innovation. Founded in 1918 as a supplier to independent grocery stores, C&S now services customers of all sizes, supplying more than 14,000 independent supermarkets, chain stores, military bases, and institutions with over 140,000 different products. To learn more, please visit www.cswg.com.

C&S community involvement programs support initiatives to fight hunger and to promote the health and enrichment of communities that are homes to the company’s employees and facilities. To learn more, please visit http://community.cswg.com.

About FoodCorps

FoodCorps connects kids to healthy food in school. Its team of AmeriCorps leaders serves in high-need schools to make sure students learn what healthy food is, fall in love with it, and eat it every day. Its corps members team up with educators to deliver lead hands-on lessons in growing, cooking, and tasting healthy food; partner with farmers and food service workers to create nutritious and delicious school meals; and collaborate with communities to build a schoolwide culture of health. Building on this foundation of direct impact, FoodCorps pursues systemic strategies that will benefit all of our nation’s 100,000 schools. To learn more, please visit foodcorps.org.

The post FoodCorps and C&S Wholesale Grocers Announce Winner of Fourth Annual Victory Growers Award appeared first on FoodCorps.

American children are hungry. To be exact: 13.1 million children under the age of 18. In a country famous for its excesses — big cars, big homes, big burgers — our children are not getting enough to eat. On Native American reservations, like the Hopi reservation where I live and serve as a FoodCorps service member, rates of food insecurity and child hunger are up to two times higher than the rest of the country. On the 2,500-square-mile Hopi reservation, there are only a handful of stores that stock fresh fruits and vegetables, and transportation and storage costs drive up their prices. Combined with the increased cost of produce and other healthy foods, widespread economic depression makes eating healthy an often-unrealistic goal compared to cheap, low-nutrient “junk” foods. Low-nutrient diets manifest in the skyrocketing rates of diet-related illnesses such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes – all of which are increasingly being linked to hunger. Nutrition education programs aimed at addressing the epidemic of diet-related illness, child hunger, and food insecurity on the reservation are failing to provide results. Here’s why:

The desolate food landscape and visibility of child hunger on Native American reservations are neither coincidence nor pure genetics. Rather, they are reverberations of years of violent colonization and oppression. One need not look further than the legacy of Native American boarding schools to get a swift introduction to the types of injustices that took and continue to take place. Today, much of that explicit violence has shifted to implicit violence, such as the subtle erasure of culture from curriculum. The subject of nutrition is no exception. Reservation cafeterias are subject to a variety of restrictions, from food group requirements to calorie and fat gram limitations. In theory, these guidelines ensure that children receive and learn about proper nutrition, thereby providing them with a ladder with which to climb out of hunger. However, on the Hopi reservation, many of the given standards are incompatible with a traditional diet, and unrealistic considering limited finances. To those living here, it is obvious that those regulations were not created with Hopi children in mind, and therefore aren’t teaching Hopi children the full significance and meaning of food.

As a non-Hopi, the significance of Hopi food is not my story to tell. However, I have noticed an obvious, inherent understanding that food is not singular, that it can’t be broken down solely into calories and groups and grams. On Hopi, conversations on food are not separate from conversations on cultural identity and sovereignty. As my Hopi supervisor puts it, “Food plays a large part in identifying who we are. Growing in this high desert climate…that’s what we’re known for. That’s how we’ve survived and will survive.”

This acknowledgement of food as non-singular points out a critical error in the teaching of nutrition in schools. If nutrition education in schools is to truly help dig our nation’s children out of hunger, it must focus less on the deductive(breaking food down into calories, fat grams, food groups) and more on the constructive (food as intersectional, as identity, culture, and life). The ladder that is given to children with deductive nutrition education is not nearly tall enough to mount the wall of colonialism, economic depression, and geographic isolation enmeshed in reservation food systems. We must help to break that wall down while still providing the leverage to climb it.

So, then, what does constructive nutrition look like? First: it’s messy. Constructive nutrition acknowledges the complexity of food, and dares to allow children to explore meanings of food beyond quantitative measurements. It teaches contextualized science, empowered science. It gives students knowledge of not only what is scientific fact, but the story of how those facts came to be, and why they are valued. Constructive nutrition recognizes that hunger, poverty, and illness are inseparable, and collaborates with unexpected partners to address not one but all three factors. Constructive nutrition works to build not only healthy bodies, but also healthy food systems and healthy communities.

Secondly, constructive nutrition is place-specific. It acknowledges the union of food, people, and cultural history. It breaks down the oppressive history of white-generated nutrition standards by allowing for the creation of alternative nutrition narratives. Constructive nutrition builds up culturally significant foods rather than reducing them down to quantitative data. Constructive nutrition is in the hands of the people.

Lastly, constructive nutrition is constantly questioning, re-evaluating, and asking itself how it can do better. Much of the above description of constructive nutrition is easier said than done. However, this should not and cannot be a deterrent to working towards it. In Moenkopi, Arizona, where I serve along with one other, we strive towards just, constructive nutrition by using the FoodCorps framework while finding ways to make it relevant to Hopi children. We acknowledge our limits, specifically my limits as anon-Hopi, and FoodCorps’ limits as a non-Hopi organization, and constantly reevaluate the work that we do.

As a national organization, FoodCorps is listening. They have offered native-led workshops at trainings, and are planning on incorporating more native community-specific workshops at future trainings. With a focus on growing and cooking healthy food, FoodCorps’ suggested curriculum is already more constructive, less deductive, than most. This is promising for their capacity to affect lasting change against food injustice and child hunger; other nutrition- and food-focused programs should follow suit. However, it is not enough. FoodCorps and other programs that want to truly participate in teaching constructive nutrition, in affecting lasting change in food systems, must constantly strive to be better, more inclusive, and more diverse. They must strive not only to serve native communities, but also to allow those communities to construct the programming of the future.

American children are hungry. Native American children are hungrier. The deductive nutrition education of old has failed them. Food is complex, immensely complex, and our solutions to food-related problems must match that complexity. Constructive nutrition education — nutrition education that acknowledges the complexity of food, defines itself as place-specific, and constantly self-evaluates – is lurking just beyond, or perhaps within the current framework. It is the solution that we desperately need. Are we willing enough to take it on?

FoodCorps Service Member Lauren Burke won the 2017 FoodCorps Victory Growers Award “for a compelling account of hunger and food insecurity,” winning a $5,000 prize for her service site, Moencopi Developers Corporation in Tuba City, AZ. The award, sponsored by C&S Wholesale Grocers, highlights that many children struggle with hunger and food insecurity, and that the food they receive at school is the most important meal they will get all day.

The post A Complex Problem Needs a Complex Solution appeared first on FoodCorps.

The Hawaiian Islands are the most isolated island chain in the world. At 2,300 miles from San Francisco, 3,900 miles from Japan, and 5,500 miles from Australia, you simply can’t get more isolated from the continents. It is on the fringe of human habitation. Over 90% of the food that is consumed in the islands is imported. Were there to be a natural disaster or emergency that would prevent this imported food from getting to Hawai’i, it would only have 10 days worth of food to support its residents at any given time.

At the easternmost end of the chain lies the youngest of the Hawaiian Islands. It is so young, in fact, that it is still being born from the ocean as the volcano Kilauea pours a steady stream of lava down the mountainside and into the ocean today. Hawai’i Island is mostly rural, with only two large towns in a place the size of Rhode Island and Connecticut combined. Then there is Puna- a mostly isolated, rural district on the windward, wet side of Hawai’i Island. Many, if not most, residents live off-grid and there are few services such as healthcare, banking, police, and grocery stores. The majority of Puna residents receive some kind of governmental assistance and nearly 30% receive food stamps. Food insecurity is simply a reality for everyone here, regardless of income.

It is in this setting that I have served as the FoodCorps service member in two low-income public charter schools. This year, I have worked with over 100 students in several different gardens, exploring concepts around science and ecology, art, and nutrition. As a garden educator joyfully growing food with students, it doesn’t always feel food insecure here. We have trees producing food year-round on our campuses and enjoy a growing season that doesn’t really end. However, the dependence on imported food from the Mainland and elsewhere is striking.

School lunch in Hawai’i is dominated by imported foods. Hawai’i has only one school district that covers all of the islands and it generally places orders with vendors that can supply an item for the entire state. Local vendors are therefore blocked out, unable to provide the quantity and lowest price that the large district demands. The School Food Services Branch procurement regulations are therefore a major barrier to addressing childhood hunger in Hawai’i since they prevent local food, which is fresher and more nutrient-dense, from being included in school lunch.

Monique Mironesco writes of school lunch regulations in Hawai’i:

“The stringent food safety rules and regulations [of school lunch in Hawai’i] prevent direct farm-to-school sales, so that children are not able to eat the foods they grow in their own school gardens in the cafeteria, and kitchens are not allowed to accept produce from individual farmers who may be willing to bypass distributors and vendors to provide locally grown produce to school cafeterias because they are not necessarily food safety certified.”

The meals served in Hawai’i’s public schools are often high in fat content and utilize recipes that have remained essentially unchanged for the past 30 years. And although we have thriving gardens at our schools, (over 40% of the public, charter, and independent K-12 schools in the state have a school garden) and fruit trees such as papayas, bananas, citrus, breadfruit, and avocado growing abundantly on our campuses, the barriers to getting these foods into the cafeteria are almost insurmountable without policy change at the state level.

Giving students the opportunity to have hands-on experiences with growing and cooking nutritious foods is another great way to address child hunger in Hawai’i. This spring, I brought a group of 12 middle and high school garden students to a local subsistence farm for a field trip. About 70% of what the farmers there eat (a community of about 14 people) comes from their land. On our field trip, we worked in the gardens and learned about the importance of adding organic matter to build soil in an area where hard, black lava rock has yet to yield to become soil. Next we harvested and cooked a delicious farm to table meal. Students helped prepare the meal of farm-raised chicken stew, pan fried taro and sweet potato, homemade hot sauce, steamed greens, and coconut “bacon.” As we filled our plates with this nutritious local food, I could see the excitement in the eyes of the students. Every single student tried and enjoyed a new dish that day.

As we began to pack up and head back to campus at the end of the day, a high school freshman girl turned to me. She said, “This is one of the best meals I have ever had! Usually, I just eat Spaghetti-Os or things like that for dinner.” In that moment, I saw the power that hands-on lessons around nutritious food have to meet the needs of children who come to school hungry. I saw a seed planted in her mind that day around what our food system could look like. She was able to catch a glimpse of a Hawai’i where we are providing the majority of our calories from our islands, rather than importing them from thousands of miles away in processed, packaged forms.

In my experience, it is this hands-on interaction with growing and preparing food that helps students to form relationships with their local food system in a meaningful way. When students learn to grow and cook food in school, they take these skills home to their families. Many of my students have begun gardening at home after falling in love with growing and cooking. When students are empowered to make healthy choices, they begin to change the buying habits of their families and for themselves as they come into adulthood.

Reducing barriers to sourcing local produce in Hawai’i School Food Services is another important way. Though Hawai’i’s agricultural producers may not immediately be able to produce enough food to fulfill all of the 100,000 meals served in Hawai’i’s schools daily, beginning to shift towards more local sourcing of school lunch products is still worth pursuing because of the positive impact this can have on childhood hunger and health. And as these children become adults, perhaps their experience with school gardens will shift the system further towards nutritious school meal options for the generations to come.

FoodCorps Service Member Carly Wyman was a runner-up in the 2017 FoodCorps Victory Growers Award “for a compelling account of hunger and food insecurity,” winning a $1,000 prize for her service site, Kua O Ka La in Pahoa, HI. The award, sponsored by C&S Wholesale Grocers, highlights that many children struggle with hunger and food insecurity, and that the food they receive at school is the most important meal they will get all day.

The post Addressing Childhood Hunger in Hawai’i’s Schools appeared first on FoodCorps.

Hunger carries different meaning to different people. For me, hunger means it’s been a few hours since my last meal, and I am starting to plan in my head what I may eat next. But in the classrooms at King and Tate Elementary it means something entirely different to over 80% of our students. This was made clear to me when I lead a lesson on food security and hunger with the 3rd graders at both schools. I began with simple questions such as how do you feel when you feel hungry? What time of day do you get hungry? Yes, a few students had answers much like my own would be: “When I start feeling hungry I just get up and go to the fridge!”; “I get hungry when I smell dinner; “Sometimes I get hungry right before lunch”; and so on. But unfortunately, the majority of the answers didn’t just describe a few minutes while waiting for our dinner to be cooked. Most of the answers consisted of, “I get really dizzy and sometimes I feel like I am going to puke”; “I am always hungry because food is expensive”; “ I can’t pay attention in school, and sometimes get really angry and hurt my friends”. Hunger for a multitude of our students is a real problem, a problem that doesn’t just go away after looking in the fridge.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what hunger looks like in the two schools where I serve because it is so invasive that it affects every aspects of our students’ lives. You could look at any aspect of a hungry child’s life and connect it back to their malnourished bodies and minds. It takes a toll on their social lives, how they are doing in school, what they can do physically, their sense of self and emotional intelligence, etc. When I am in a classroom and a student is not listening, it is not because they do not want to learn, but often because their hunger is preventing them from doing so. When a student cannot control their emotions or behavior, it is likely that they are hungry or that their bodies are fueled with foods that are insufficient. One student told me it was harder for him to make friends because he gets so angry all the time due to his hunger. What does hunger look like? It looks like a child who is robbed of her full potential, a child who could do anything, but because her body is starved, her mind likewise languishes, a child with a very bleak future.

At a time when education budgets are under such scrutiny, and the future of public education is uncertain some may ask why should we invest in services such as FoodCorps. Why should we be concerned with food education when our schools can’t afford proper books, technologies, and other materials seen as essential for the cultivation of young minds? Some may think that focusing on food, gardens, and nutrition in the classroom is a waste of time, that this sort of education should happen at home. But what good are books and new technology if there is no food at home and all you can focus is on is the pain in your belly?

If we do not invest in these programs, we are setting students, our schools, and our communities up for failure. Our food system has isolated us from food, it has disconnected us from the sources of our food; it has taken away our power to know and to choose what we put in our bodies. If my students do get to eat, they eat foods that are completely devoid of minerals and vitamins that are essential for their development, which is why most of them cannot control their behaviors or emotions, cannot focus in school, and do not develop to their full physical, emotional or mental potential. I am discovering moreover, that even when my students are offered access to fresh, healthy foods, it is alien and strange to most of them; they often do not want to try it, or certainly do not know how to prepare it. Without this knowledge how do we expect them to build healthy eating habits? How can we expect them to make healthy choices?

My first day of service, I walked into the cafeteria at one school to talk to students about food. I asked what their favorite vegetables were and got responses such as “ice cream” or “noodles”. After many lessons inside and outside in the garden, after countless taste tests of new foods in the cafeteria and classrooms, I had one student say “I use to not like lettuce, but after trying it a lot of different ways and seeing how fast it grows, I like it”. This student now has tools to nourish her body, and is open to trying new foods that will help with that process.

For her, and so many students like her, she has gained new power, not only to eat healthy, but to take control over other aspects of her life, especially her ability to focus and learn. Her education was controlled by hunger, but it is now hers to control. This is what FoodCorps service, and other similar programs do. Through investments in preventing childhood hunger in our schools, we educate students about healthy food choices, and in so doing, we are planting the seeds that may just help them reach their potential. By serving and empowering these children, we are seeding not only their future, but ours. Legend has it that a pioneer, gazing for the first time at the Grand Canyon said, “Something big happened here.” Considering the difference that our gardens are making, in the life of even one child, I believe the same can truthfully be stated about FoodCorps, something big is happening here. Please help it grow.

FoodCorps Service Member Mary Grace Stoneking was a runner-up in the 2017 FoodCorps Victory Growers Award “for a compelling account of hunger and food insecurity,” winning a $1,000 prize for her service site, Van Buren School District in Van Buren, AR. The award, sponsored by C&S Wholesale Grocers, highlights that many children struggle with hunger and food insecurity, and that the food they receive at school is the most important meal they will get all day.

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I know that nearly 90 percent of the students at the 3 elementary schools I serve qualify for free or reduced price lunch, and thus are likely coming from food insecure families. However, these moments in which I can clearly see the face of hunger still have a great effect on me. Hunger is generally associated with people unable to obtain enough food, and these days, we know a nourishing meal is more than just the quantity of calories; it is about quality. Those two cookies may have had “enough” calories but did not contain the vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, fiber and other life-giving components that whole, unprocessed food contains.

As a FoodCorps service member, I help connect kids to real food to help them grow up healthy. I do this by engaging kids directly in growing vegetables in the school garden as well as making healthy snacks in classrooms and afterschool programs. I also work with teachers to have them lead these positive experiences, providing them with training and resources to better incorporate fruits and vegetables and garden activities into their classes.

Through these activities, kids not only eat real food, but learn skills to grow and prepare nutritious meals on their own. However, efforts to expand school gardens, prepare food, or increase access to local produce are a struggle in my schools. Parents cannot support farm to school opportunities because they work multiple low-paying jobs.  Teachers must focus their instructional time on boosting test scores rather than offering food-based activities. Staff turnover is high, preventing continued, high levels of commitment to school gardens.

Though these fundamental issues are nearly impossible to tackle in a short-term position that does not allow political advocacy, my experience with FoodCorps has given me the support to one day become a leader in this field and make significant, lasting change. Service members have the opportunity to join Communities of Learning, Inquiry, and Practice to delve deeper into policy, community organizing, and topics of equity. At national trainings, we get to hear from food system leaders such as LaDonna Redmond and Deb Eschmeyer. We are encouraged to ask tough questions to our national staff, are given platform to our voices through media, and are involved in important changes to our organization and future efforts to foster equity, diversity, and inclusion. These experiences and opportunities for reflection, discussion, and growth strengthen our organization and its emerging leaders in tackling larger issues.

In my years of service, I have helped to nourish kids by increasing access to food that will feed their bodies and minds. But just as importantly, I have had direct connections with hungry kids and the struggles of the communities they come from. FoodCorps not only helps kids to grow up healthy but gives service members the experiences and tools to one day address larger systemic issues that result in hunger.

This essay was a runner up for the 2016 FoodCorps Victory Growers Award. The award, sponsored by C&S Wholesale Grocers,  highlights that many children struggle with hunger and food insecurity, and that the food they receive at school is the most important meal they will get all day.

The post Real Food and Real Skills to Combat Hunger appeared first on FoodCorps.

The hunger is often hidden in my classrooms. Students do not just tell me they did not have dinner last night. That truth is uncovered when I read between the lines.

“Where does food come from?”

I ask this question during many of my nutrition and gardening lessons, and students’ answers reveal the issue of child hunger in our community. Food comes from boxes and cans, gas stations, and fast food chains (they can name every one, but do not always recognize vegetables I bring to class). The Pre-K and 1^st grade students I serve with excitedly shout out these answers, but the reality of these answers is not as exciting. Some of my students walk to gas stations with a couple of dollars to buy their dinners. These stores have processed foods high in sugar and fat, and very few fresh fruits and vegetables. Every child should have access to food that will help them grow and thrive, but that is not always feasible.

I have watched teachers give out food to families so they know they will eat that night, seen students beg for the extra fresh fruit or vegetable snack, and had one student cry because there were no seconds during a lesson. During a vegetable taste test, a sixth grader took a small bite of broccoli, turned his nose up and set it back on his paper. He turned to me and said, “Is all we get is vegetables today?” Before I could even respond, another student exclaimed, “Man, it is free food! Just eat it, you don’t turn that down.” This same young man took home many of the leftover vegetables. It took a while for me to fully process this moment. These students are eleven years old and have to consider the cost of food being a factor of how well they will eat in a day. Our students at DPS have to face many challenges beyond doing well on tests and being good students.

There is no doubt food access, food security, and child hunger are issues students of Detroit face. The real issue is, however: How do we help? How do we ensure children have food to eat when they walk out of school?

There is no one solution. Detroit is still writing its comeback story and with each struggle Detroit faces, it has the opportunity to learn and create new solutions. The DPS Office of School Nutrition, the Detroit School Garden Collaborative and FoodCorps are helping improve food access and nutrition education in DPS. The Detroit School Garden Collaborative is a school garden program that shows students food does not have to come from a box or a can, they can grow it. Students love being in the garden, and many share stories about how their family members garden too. Throughout the course of this year, I have watched many students grow and learn to appreciate the garden and the food that comes from it. The biggest success stories are when students take vegetables home and come back to tell me how they cooked and ate them with their family. Programs like the Detroit School Garden Collaborative educate and empower students and families to practice healthier habits and learn to grow their own food. That is how we work towards a solution to hunger, by putting people first.

“Where does food come from?”

This question is not easy for everyone to answer in Detroit. When we start the conversation about child hunger, it opens the door to countless other social issues. Hunger is not the only struggle Detroit students face; many of them come from broken homes, have no permanent residences, or may not have a clean clothes to put on in the morning. That does not make the problem too big to solve, because we have to start somewhere. When I see students discover a new favorite fruit or vegetable, lick their plates clean after we cook together, and get over their fear of soil and worms in the garden, I know positive changes are happening. It is our job, as a community, to not give up on Detroit or the students of Detroit Public Schools.

The DPS Office of School Nutrition has a motto: “It takes more than books for children to learn.” Children need encouragement, opportunities, love and nourishment to grow. I am proud to be a part of this as a FoodCorps service member. My students have taught me more this year than I could have ever imagined. When I look at them, I do not see hungry, less fortunate children; I see potential. I believe in them, and their futures. They deserve the same chances as all other students in America. Together, I know we can help show these students just how valuable they are.

This essay was a runner up for the 2016 FoodCorps Victory Growers Award. The award, sponsored by C&S Wholesale Grocers,  highlights that many children struggle with hunger and food insecurity, and that the food they receive at school is the most important meal they will get all day.

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