Ranchers Since 1965
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Serving Farmers and Ranchers Since 1965 |
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Connecting what we grow and what we eat is something Farm-to-School helps to do. It fills the gap between our harvest and our meals. Kids have fun with this project and are pleased to participate. This process helps children better relate to how their food choices affect their own health, their family, and the local farmer. The kids develop a better understanding of where and how their food is grown, while they help sustain the shrinking population of small farms. The program hopes to expand, to include more farmers, more Oklahoma-grown produce and more schools. A statewide Farm-to-School program would do much for the future
health of children and to revitalize Oklahoma's struggling rural
communities.
My grandparents grew up in an era where much of the food they ate was fresh from the farm. As a result the nutritional value of their food was much higher than the processed foods most kids eat today and the overall health of the people of their day was better. The problem with the processed foods is that the milling process they go through removes virtually everything that's good for you, leaving only empty calories. Fresh foods still have the vitamins and minerals, which are so essential to growth and development in the human body. The idea brought forth by the Farm-to-School Program to put produce
directly from local farms onto local school lunch lines could assist
greatly in changing the trend from the processed fast foods that
are so prevalent on the menus of school lunchrooms today and damaging
to children's health.
The Farm-to-School program could be extremely beneficial to Oklahoma. Most importantly, it would teach children about nutrition and provide them with an opportunity to eat healthier foods, which would help to slow down the rapidly rising obesity rates. The Farm-to-School program would also teach kids about where
the fresh fruits and vegetables that they are getting in school
come from, and it would teach them about agriculture and how it
affects Oklahoma's economy. Jessica Warren, Lamont
With obesity rates rising among school aged children, along with the sputtering economy in rural areas, this program could be a leap in the right direction for public schools, farmers, and the children who will benefit from the Farm-to-School program. With the problem of the rising obesity rate among children and the fact that 85% of food choices in school vending machines are of poor nutritional value, the fact that the food from the program has high nutritional value is a major incentive for institutions to buy from Farm-to-School. A person can easily see why Oklahoma and its public institutions need the Farm-to-School program. It can fight obesity in what is a very unhealthy world. It can fuel the economy, helping the small farmer become more profitable, also making the small rural community a more attractive place to raise a family. Brady Brewer, Hunter |
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Field Notes is the Kerr Center's free quarterly newsletter. It is sent to subscribers across Oklahoma, the United States, and beyond, to distant parts of the globe. To subscribe, contact us at mailbox@kerrcenter.com. From 1999 until the present, Field Notes has been put in the pdf format. To read pdf files, you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader. The software is available free to download from www.adobe.com. Articles from the newsletter may be reprinted if credit is given and a copy is sent to the newsletter editor at the Kerr Center. To use more than short articles or news items on the web, please link to our web page. Direct questions about the newsletter or this web page, to Maura McDermott, Editor. mailbox@kerrcenter.com |
