Grandview Elementary students are excited about eating the yellow kale flowers they’ve grown as part of the Vancouver school’s participation in VCH’s Farm to School program.
Farm to School is a school based program linking school children from Kindergarten to grade 12 with local farms. These programs close the distance between farm and fork and bring local, nutritious and sustainably produced foods into our schools. Farm to School programs are an essential component of strong, resilient, sustainable, and economically viable, regional food systems – systems that contribute to the health of people, place, and the planet.
The overarching Farm to School goal is to improve the health of school-aged children by increasing access to locally grown, nutritious, safe, and culturally appropriate foods in schools.
For the many adults just starting to learn about the magic of kale, the students at Grandview Elementary in Vancouver are one step ahead. They are devouring tasty, yellow kale flowers by the handful. As a crop that can do well in Vancouver’s winters, kale (and its flowers) are commonly found in school gardens and surprisingly to parents, a perfect food to add to a lunch tray. Eating flowers makes kale even more exciting to students and provides timely teaching about the seed cycle and biology.
Five schools in VCH are currently participating in Farm to School with support from Vancouver Coastal Health staff and a Greater Vancouver F2S Steering Committee. Thanks to a Vancity enviroFund grant this year, four more schools have taken on the F2S challenge: the North Vancouver Outdoor School, Queen Alexandra Elementary (Vancouver), Tillicum Elementary (Vancouver), and the Vancouver Waldorf School (North Vancouver). These schools will spend this school year planning their initiative, integrating food literacy into the curriculum, connecting with farmers and piloting their Farm to School lunch.
For more information about Farm to School, please visit www.phabc.org/farmtoschool
Elementary school students serve up a colour plateful of goodness at Grandview Elementary.