Food education starts at an early age

Northeast kids are learning about smart eating.

In 1993, two Twin Cities food co-ops, The Wedge and Mississippi Market, started a food community outreach initiative, which led a group of local educators to found the Midwest Food Connection (MFC) in 1997. 

Its goal was to educate schools and their students about natural foods (and it received a three-year grant from the state to expand its field trip program to local farms). MFC’s program now reaches around 5,000 students in 30 schools in the metro area per year. 

A recent visit to the New City Charter School, 1500 6th St. NE, illustrated their work.

The school’s two dozen kindergarten students gathered in a circle on the classroom floor to hear MFC’s Food Educator Missy McDonald talk about the purpose of the lessons: “All of our lessons have to do with smart eating for ourselves and for the planet, and that includes … saving food and not wasting food, but being smart about what we eat and being smart to help our planet.” 

She wrote the word “organic” on the whiteboard, and said it meant to grow plants in ways that are healthy for people and animals and for the soil that it grows in. “And with organic, there are a lot of rules you have to follow, and the farmers who do that get to have a little sticker on their food, telling you where and how it was grown.” 

McDonald held up an orange, a pair of Cosmic Crisp apples and a can of beans, showing the “organic” stickers on each. With the help of a slicer, she cut the two apples into 24 pieces, and asked the students to smell, touch and lick the slices before eating them, calling for a thumbs up if they liked them (it was unanimous). She added that the leftover cores can be composted rather than thrown away. 

McDonald also touched on the subjects of chemical spraying of farms and gardens, using ladybugs to eat other insects and apple traps to draw pests away from the apples. She showed samples of weeds and straw that can make mulch to surround the growing plants.

Announcing that it was snack time, McDonald held up bunches of dill, chives and mint which would be used to make herb butter. Kindergarten teachers Jeremy Nellis and Ellie Menso moved the children to tables where they ground up the sprigs with their fingers, releasing the flavors. They then used little wooden spoons to mix them with organic butter and spread it on bread slices.

The Eastside Food Co-op sponsors their lessons in Northeast Minneapolis, allowing MFC to offer them at no charge to New City, Waite Park, Webster and Marcy schools. 

McDonald noted that lessons for the kindergarteners run about 45 minutes, with an hour for older children. She said it’s not often that they can actually do the cooking part, “but we send the recipes home so we demo it, they taste it. One class involved a winter vegetable stew, and the teacher got the recipe. I came back the next week to find that a third of the kids had pushed their parents to make the recipe.” 

She hopes that the message doesn’t stop at the end of the class, but continues and helps build relationships that will endure.

At the end of the session, after the children cleaned up the remains and straightened the tables and chairs, McDonald said to the group, “Thank you for inviting me to your classroom. We’ve really gotten to know each other and learned a lot about smart eating for ourselves, for our planet. We have learned how to not waste food. We learned a big word called ‘conserve,’ how to conserve food. And today, that’s what we did.”