Do Kids Who Garden and Cook Eat Better?
September 23rd, 2010 · 4 Comments · Posted in kids, school food
Cooking lesson at Berkeley's Edible Schoolyard
Elementary school children regularly involved in gardening, cooking and nutrition education are more likely to develop a taste for fresh fruits and vegetables–even leafy greens–and will more eagerly help make fresh meals at home, but those gains come to a screeching halt as kids get older and move into middle school, where they often backslide.
Those are the mixed results from a three-year evaluation of the “School Lunch Initiative” undertaken by Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation in Berkeley, Calif., schools. Performed by researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, and easily the most ambitious examination to date of an integrated school garden and cooking program, the report [PDF] found that fifth-graders in the second year of the program increased their vegetable consumption by one serving per day and also ate more fruit. Sixty percent of the parents of those children said involvement in the gardening and cooking initiative had made their child more aware of healthier food choices.
By seventh grade, however, student improvement even in Berkeley’s most advanced middle school slowed almost to a standstill, although students were significantly more likely to enjoy the food served in the cafeteria and had better knowledge of how their food choices affected the environment. Still, their small rate of improvement was much better than in schools where the initiative was less robust. There, seventh graders actually showed declines in food knowledge: 6 percent lower in one middle school, 14 percent in another.
The findings roughly confirm my own anecdotal experiences working in the “dining commons” at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School where the students, despite being involved in Waters’ flagship “Edible Schoolyard” gardening and cooking program, displayed a conspicuous indifference to vegetables in the food line. The three-year evaluation seems to indicate that while children at a certain age embrace the idea of eating more healthfully, they lapse into a sort of food funk after entering puberty.
So, do memories of gardening and cooking lessons revive in high school or after adolescence and produce more food-conscious adults? That seemed to be the hope of Berkeley’s food service team, who stressed to me repeatedly while I was there that kids must be exposed to healthier foods even if they don’t eat them, that the lessons will inform their eating habits later in life.
“I think in Middle School developmentally kids are all over the place. It is really a tough stage and it is also reflected in their food choices,” Bonnie Christenson, executive chef for Berkeley schools, said today when asked about the evaluation’s results. “In high school you see the kids starting to eat salad again. They are moving away from their parents’ control but they are more mature and responsible. They eat a wider variety of foods including veggies.”
But, as Christenson notes, “The study doesn’t cover a long enough period to reflect this.”
“I really do think it makes an impact for life–truly,” said chef Ann Cooper, who was hired by Waters to reform the meal program at Berkeley and now runs food service for schools in Boulder, Co. “Middle School is tough no matter what. But in all other academic domains we continue to work with them and we need to in this area as well.”
Waters, who was quoted celebrating the study’s results in The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, did not respond to my query about the underwhelming middle school results.
Berkeley schools are in the fifth year of a major food service overhaul instigated by parents with help from the Chez Panisse Foundation and the non-profit Center for Ecoliteracy. The schools eliminated processed, reheated meals and adopted food made from scratch. A local bond initiative helped pay for a new central kitchen. Meanwhile, the School Lunch Initiative, designed to show children the connection between how food is grown and prepared and their own health, installed gardens in all 11 of the district’s elementary schools and three middle schools. Thirteen instructional kitchens were built.
Waters’ vision of children growing and cooking their own food has inspired school gardens across the country. The perceived benefits have been the subject of sometimes furious debate.
To varying degrees, students in Berkeley’s “School Lunch Initiative” were engaged in gardening and cooking intermittently during the school year, but the program was stronger at some schools than others. For instance, some schools did not have paid garden staff or dedicated cooking instructors. Over the course of the three-year evaluation, researchers used questionnaires as well as photographs of what kids chose for lunch to measure the impact at schools with the most highly developed programs, compared to those where kids spent less time gardening and cooking.
In the more dynamic programs, for instance, food grown in the garden was harvested and used in a cooking class. The same food was then served in the school cafeteria. The Martin Luther King Middle School, where Waters’ original “Edible Schoolyard” is staffed by several workers in the garden, and includes a lavish kitchen facility with individual work stations, a convection oven, a dishwashing area, and a dedicated instructor, was not mentioned by name in the report. But the best results seventh graders managed to muster out of the district’s three middle schools–presumably at Martin Luther King–was a five percent improvement in food knowledge, despite all the resources lavished on them.
Initially, 327 students were involved in the study, but by year three the number had dropped to 238.
The Berkeley schools are racially and ethnically highly diverse. Among all the families involved, more than 90 percent of parents said it was “very important” to serve their child fresh fruits and vegetables every day, 75 percent said it was important to serve whole grains, and nearly half thought it was very important to serve locally grown foods.
Researchers said they were puzzled that overall only 30 percent of the children studied helped with meal preparation at home.
For more great stories about how we are taking back our food system, read Fight Back Friday.
Seriously, they were puzzled as to why more children didn’t help with meal preparation at home? I can think of two reasons. One, that in many homes “meal preparation” includes sticking a frozen pizza in the oven, shaking salad from a bag, and topping it with bottled salad dressing. Irrespective of how you feel about that kind of meal, it seems obvious that it’s not really much of a group activity.
The second likely reason is that the kids do it at school because it’s compulsory. My own preschool aged child does lots of things at daycare because she and everyone else has to. Sometimes she wants to cook with me, but often she doesn’t. I’m hardly about to force that issue, which would make cooking feel like an unpleasant chore for her — not exactly the idea I want to instill. My guess is that many other kids are indifferent to cooking and their parents don’t force the issue, either.
It’s fascinating to read about the study’s results. I would love to see healthier choices and a garden at my children’s school, but as a parochial school, we have fewer resources.
My kids mostly are not into vegetables though we do emphasize eating them and we certainly serve them to the chorus of whines and groans. However, my kids love helping in the kitchen. Even the two year old is involved in making food. We also cook almost everything from scratch. A lot of our vegetables come from our garden or local farmers. I made sure that as babies, my children tried veggies first, and lots of veggies, but they still limit their veggie likes.
Quite an interesting study! My take on it…
While student improvement wasn’t as great in the middle schools, I do think that their food experiences in elementary school is important to their food choices as adults. Elementary school is all about establishing the basics, not only with food choices, but even in obvious aspects like study habits. Even if children stray during middle and high school times, I have faith that they will return to how they were taught.
That being said, while the school gardening projects may help, a large part of improving how food is viewed is also on the family and the time at home. From my experiences, as a college student, I’m quite conscious about the foods I eat, but that is due in a large part to my extremely health-conscious mother. Growing up with her constant mantras for little oil, little sugar, and little salt, I now make the same decisions when it comes to my food choices.
Perhaps a future study could incorporate a larger community intervention that not only has the school garden at school, but also community events to involve parents and families as well. As an intervention that affects all aspects of the student life, perhaps a greater difference in food choices even through middle school can be seen.
It does seem to me that the drop in middle school is as much a function of puberty, and a change in the programming. If it carried on through all of school, perhaps a steady increase would continue.