Eating Healthy Crucial For Children

New Britain Roots teaches importance of starting young

Apples, broccoli, and cauliflower are just as important as the A, B, Cs when it comes to growing children. At New Britain Roots, students learn the benefits of not only a healthy diet with locally sourced food, but the power of growing your own garden.

New Britain Roots has their – well – roots down in many areas that impact the local community. Some include farmers markets that bring together local vendors, they create food maps on resources around the city, but most importantly, they have a hand in educating children about the importance of good food.

With the elementary and middle schools and the New Britain Parks and Recreation, they offer “garden-based education […] allowing youth to experience food in new ways and discover the impacts of a healthy lifestyle.” Children in these clubs spend time in gardens and greenhouses where they learn sustainable practices and the time-honored methods of growing your own food.

For at-risk students they offer after school programs where they can take the food that is grown through the sustainable agriculture and learn how to process it into something tasty and nutritional.

Through these and the other programs that are offered, students can learn the value of food through examining exactly what it is that they eat. Something that has become lost over time as society has relied more and more on processed foods.

Noted journalist Michael Pollan who writes frequently about the importance of food offers the rule “If it’s a plant, eat it, if it was made in a plant, don’t.”

“Pollan,” on his website, “points out that populations that eat like modern-day Americans — lots of highly processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of refined grains — suffer high rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. But populations that eat more traditional diets don’t. Our great-grandmas knew what they were doing.”

This is extremely important information as children have recently seen an uptick in the rates of obesity. Largely due to the pandemic, this has drawn attention from state and national health experts who express caution about the negative effects on health issues and mental issues like self-esteem.

Learning the value of good food is clearly just as important as calculus or chemistry – and to be fair, you might not need to use advanced equations, but you do have to eat every day. With New Britain Roots, students can get outside and get their hands dirty – and truly reap the fruits of their labor.

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