Nutritious, delicious

Childhood nutrition is under serious threat these days, and a new community partnership is working to change that. I asked volunteer Jay Cohen, who created and implemented the partnership along with Peg Tomlinson and Melissa Haworth, about the program’s success so far:

“The macro [success has been] getting the UC Davis campus school of nutrition, [the UC Davis] Vascular Center and Grant Union High School to collaborate on a long-term and short-term vision and project that serves the needs of kids and science—the idea that we could take Grant Union’s very progressive school garden/nutrition/cooking program and add the important elements of long-term science outcomes and data tracking.

“We successfully interwove field trips into Grant Union’s summer program that gave the kids cooking experience with working chefs and surgeons who could connect good food to health and bad food to disease.

“In future, we want to take Grant Union’s program and give it the credentials it needs to inspire the whole region to change the kids’ food crisis (obesity, diabetes, eventual vascular disease).”