Program helps students to give peas a chance

Children find new vegetables, fruits taste good

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photos by GRETCHEN PHILLIPS Jerell Givans, center, and Craig Curtis, right, prekindergarten students at Mount Hope/Nanjemoy Elementary school hold various types of tomatoes during a farmers market fresh fruits and vegetables program at the school Friday. E-Mail This Article | Print This Story Click here to enlarge this photo Jude Wilburn, 7, touches different types of lettuce at the market. Click here to enlarge this photo Xavien Carroll, 6, examines tomatoes as Anna Beyer, food service manager, talks to students about different types of lettuce and tomatoes.

Students at Mount Hope/Nanjemoy Elementary School are no longer turning up their noses at strange looking fruits and vegetables before giving them a try.

Through a grant, the school has put together a fresh fruits and vegetables program introducing students to new fruits and vegetables each week. The program is referred to at the school as the farmers market.

Mount Hope/Nanjemoy is the first school in Charles County to offer a program like farmers market according to Crystal Sopher, Charles County school system's food service field operations manager.

Sopher said the program gives schools an opportunity to broaden children's knowledge of different fruits and vegetables.

Sopher said throughout the year, food service workers and teaching staff at the school have become more knowledgeable as well.

Mount Hope/Nanjemoy Principal Annie Blount was the beneficiary of the new knowledge as she found herself enjoying a vegetable she thought she would never enjoy — asparagus.

Blount said one week asparagus and strawberries were featured and the food service workers created a recipe for the asparagus that she enjoyed. Blount said she went home and baked asparagus almost exactly the way food services baked it and she discovered her aversion to asparagus had gone away.

Offering students prepared versions of the fresh fruits and vegetables is just one portion of the program.

According to Sopher and Anna Beyer, food service manager at Mount Hope/Nanjemoy, students are introduced to the raw form of the fruit and vegetable, they see books available at the school library which feature the weekly fruit or vegetable, they see different foods and products which have the fruit or vegetable in it and then they get to sample prepared foods with the veggie under discussion.

Each class is brought to the cafeteria which is transformed into a small farmers market. Friday was tomato and lettuce day. Students got a chance to see a display of various different kinds of lettuce and tomatoes, including exotic tomatoes. All fruits and vegetables are locally purchased.

Students can hold the fruits and vegetables to get a better sense of what they are like.

Moving on to the next booth, students can read about the different kinds of tomatoes and lettuce before they get to the booth which shows them tomato soup, pizza, ketchup and other products which contain tomatoes. Many younger students were surprised to learn that whole tomatoes are used to create pizza sauce.

Students then got to sample different salads and sliced tomatoes before heading back to class.

"I like the new things we get to eat, and I like that [teachers] teach us about the fruits," Joshua Nwadeyi, 9, said.

Taylor Hagen, 10, said the farmers market helps her to get an opportunity to try new things and live a healthier life.

Taylor and friends agreed that one vegetable they turned their noses up to at first was squash. The girls said it did not look good but it tasted good.

"Squash is awesome," Taylor said.

Caitlin Richardson said she did not like cauliflower before it was presented at the farmers market.

"When I tried it before, it seemed a little bad. When I tried it with ranch [dressing] it was really good," she said.

A group of third-graders turned their noses up at asparagus when it was presented earlier this year but now agree that it wasn't too bad.

"It's squishy," Cebria Swann, 7, said of the asparagus.

Friday was the last week for the market this year, and school administrators hope to be able to provide the program again next year.

gphillips@somdnews.com