Getting kids connected to carrots.

Our plan

It's so fricking simple it's brilliant. The need was so clear. Cooking for a private household in a wealthy neighborhood in Connecticut 8 years ago, I brought home carrots with green tops and the kids had no idea what they were. What? You mean carrots aren't those one inch things that come in plastic baggies? At first I thought, "Come on, these kids are fooling me." But nope, since then I've been on a crusade to get kids reconnected to their carrots. To the source of healthy food - the healthy earth and family farms. And that food pyramid, and all that TALK about healthy food just ain't doing it. The kids have to get their hands and their MOUTHS on this food if we want them to start eating it.

What we did

Today, after doing similar work in San Francisco at Mission High School and with Pie Ranch, I've shifted my focus on South Los Angeles and co-founded a new non-profit, RootDown LA - Based now at Manual Arts High School, we build preferences and demand for healthy food by getting in kids' faces with bowls of beets, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers and onions. We do it in classrooms and we do it at McGrath Family Farm. We then get these kids to get other kids to eat their veggies. We have asked hundreds of kids, "Write about your favorite food memory. Whatever that is. A road trip stop, a holiday meal, what you eat at home or in a restaurant. Tell us about the food, who was there, what were the smells, what made it memorable - it doesn't even have to be a "good" food memory. Maybe your first taste of mushrooms made you want to hurl and it was really funny. Never, not once, has a kid ever written about a Cheeto or Potato Chip. Once a youth in foster care who'd lived a transient life wrote about a fast food meal. That's it. Otherwise? Our kids in inner cities have memories of mole from a family farm in Mexico, homemade papusas their granny makes on birthdays, calamari which tasted kinda rubbery at first but then burst into flavor. They know deep down, healthy food isn't so nasty if you know what to do with it. And if they can get through the mountains of processed food that's so readily avilable to them and find a seasonal peach, a persimmon or grated beet with lemon and garlic and salt, they want to eat these things. We've formalized this process - of getting kids to think about what they eat, and have an experience with healthy food that will change their minds and their preferences. In doing so we build demand to meet the supply of healthy food we hope will increase in South LA. Last summer we launched RootDown LA, a project of Community Partners and now we juggle our paid jobs while we fundraise and plan for expansion to other schools. The Annenberg Foundation gave us $25,000 to hire a Youth Coordinator and pay youth stipends. This fall we begin training a core of kids who can be the bearers of the beets and broccoli to their peers. We hope eventually, they will be prepared to open their own, and work at others' healthy food enterprises, and to influence our communities and our legistators to make healthy food a fundamental part of public policy.