Kids in the Garden: Caring for the Environment and Making Healthy Food Choices

Kids in the Garden: Caring for the Environment and Making Healthy Food Choices

I do not recall the specific date when Rita and I met, but she called me about a project to evaluate schools run by the Bureau of Indian Education; we did that project and while we were discussing and visiting those schools, we began talking about Rita’s Kids in the Garden project and the service-learning project that I do with my Introduction to American Indian Studies classes. We discovered that we had many common interests. We wanted our students to think and learn about where their food comes from and to learn what it takes to have healthy food on our plates. Children are never too young to learn about healthy food and to learn that they like different foods. They can experience this by going outside and working with others or in a garden they create. By the time they are in college, they’ve had many food experiences, but they may not have had good experiences with healthy foods or understand that most foods come from plants.

The photo to the left is from my Introduction to American Indian Studies class where we go to New Ground Farm for a day (actually an hour and a half or more) of service. Service-learning with a farm that is Native owned is important to the Foodways theme of the course. Students have to write about their day of service and they also have to write another paper about their own dietary choices identifying the Indigenous foods that they are mostly, mindlessly eating.

The University of North Carolina at Pembroke (UNCP) is a small campus with a majority-minority population. Most of our students come from families where diabetes is a known health concern and many have more than one extended family member dealing with the disease. We also happen to have a campus that is surrounded on two sides by fast-food restaurants that are strategically situated across from campus.

I know from reading my students’ papers on their eating habits that they would like to eat healthier than they typically do, but most feel that they don’t have time to plan their meals. All of them write that they eat healthy homemade meals whenever they can with their families, but most admit that they don’t eat that way throughout the week.

The most popular on-campus restaurant is Chick-fil-A; some of my students eat there at least three times a week or more. They cite the convenience and say that the cafeteria costs too much or takes too much time. What my students don’t know when they write their papers is that many Native Americans are diagnosed with diabetes as young adults (McLaughlin, 2010). Robeson County has tracts where 22% of its population has diabetes and it has an overall diabetes rate of 18.4% (NCDHHS, 2020).

The majority of my students are not Native American, but when we talk about their foodways papers as a group, most students know someone who has diabetes; this is a national issue.

Robeson County is a county with a very long history of agriculture both before and since colonization. Now we have a Walmart where a lot of people do their grocery shopping and we still have a grocery store called Piggly Wiggly. At “The Pig”, you can see a wide variety of fresh or nearly fresh vegetables and fruit on styrofoam trays wrapped in cellophane (plastic). Shopping there makes me wonder if children frequenting the store know that styrofoam and plastic wrapping are not the way we used to get our produce.

It used to be that families here all maintained a family garden where children from a very young age were regularly engaged in the care and weeding of the plants from which they would later harvest most of the foods their family would eat throughout the year. Those foods had to last all year because most Native families could not afford to eat out or shop at grocery stores regularly. Families also raised their chickens and pigs for meat. Now most families shop weekly at a grocery store and some online to feed their families. Some families do not cook at home at all and some children do not know that cooking is an important skill until they come to campus and learn that sometimes the campus cafeteria isn’t open.

I recently changed the directions for the foodways paper; I asked my students to include a comparative piece. Now in addition to tracking their eating habits for two days and writing about their results, they also have to call an elder in their family to ask about what sorts of foods their elder was eating when they were their age. Most students have never asked an elder about what foods they ate when they were young. Many are surprised that their elders had very different lives from their own and that they were eating healthy foods from family gardens. The agricultural habits of my students’ elders were very similar to those of Native people in Robeson County. To have enough food to eat, families had to maintain a garden. It wasn’t just a habit of being raised in a Native community, it was a condition of survival for a lot of North Carolina families.

Children learn about food from their parents, extended families, and from their communities. Children don’t have to wait to learn about where their food comes from. And families don’t have to start a family garden to teach their children about eating healthy foods. I don’t encourage my students to start a garden because I understand how much work a garden demands. Instead, as much as possible, I encourage them to shop for organically grown foods without pesticides (like those at New Ground Farm). We also talk about the realities of being budget-conscious as well as diet-conscious. Trying to make healthy choices within our budgets doesn’t always mean we can purchase foods that are organic and pesticide-free. However, my students know that they need to start paying attention to what they eat and that diabetes may be a consequence if they don’t.

Here is where Mary Ann and I disagree. I strongly encourage students and parents to start growing their gardens wherever they are. It is easier than ever with the many new growing products available such as garden towers and planters, vertical gardening, container gardening, and raised bed gardening. Mary Ann and I agree on sustainable gardens that are organic and pesticide-free. A sustainable garden helps the earth by regenerating soil, encouraging biodiversity, and improving ecosystem health. These practices include planting herbs and native wildflowers along with vegetables. Some eco-friendly, time and money-saving methods are composting, using water barrels, companion gardening, and encouraging good bugs to live in your garden for pest control.

The Kids in the Garden program, funded by grants from the Burroughs-Wellcome SSEP program, Duke Energy Foundation, and the Farm Bureau of Robeson County, engages preK12 students and teachers in garden-based STEAM learning using the 3H Model of socioemotional learning (Trundle & Smith, 2017). Garden-based learning has been shown to improve academic performance, reduce behavioral problems, promote personal development, enhance problem-solving skills, and encourage physical activity in children (Berg et al., 2020; Cottrell & Cottrell, 2020). Connecting children with nature through out-of-door experiences such as gardens fosters an appreciation of nature and pro-environmental behaviors (DeVille et al., 2021) leading to the development of nature identity, science identity, and STEM career interest (Wheeler et al., 2024). The grants provided funding for four elementary sustainable school gardens in the Public Schools of Robeson County, a middle school garden in Bladen County, and a high school garden in Cumberland County. PreK5 students and teachers with guidance from UNCP professors Hagevik, Campbell, and Farley, and undergraduate Biology students designed, planted, and maintained the sustainable school gardens year-round in Robeson County. The program is connected to a University focus on agriculture in the region. The UNCP Campus Garden and Apiary is a model for the schools and community of sustainable gardens and is a place where many activities such as education, research, and outreach occur. Some of the many activities the students engage in include nature journaling (Laws, 2021), citizen science (Hagevik & Campbell, 2023), creating three sisters’ gardens (Trundle et al., 2022) observing and creating homes for native bees (Wheeler et al., 2024), studying pollen (Wheeler et al., 2023), growing medicinal plants and herbs, and engineering how to grow, harvest, and cook your food (Vela et al, 2022). Children are natural explorers and are curious about the world around them. Parents and teachers can facilitate children’s wonder and inquiring minds by engaging them in out-of-door experiences such as sustainable gardening to connect them to the natural world, expose them to STEAM, and create a community and culture of caring for where they live.