Veggie Project Trying To Improve Children’s Eating Habits (transcript)

By Anne Marshall

Getting one child to love fruits and vegetables can be a challenge. Now imagine taking on whole neighborhoods. Davidson County alone has a 40% childhood obesity rate, but one program is making initial strides to change that. WPLN’s Anne Marshall reports on the Veggie Project, an effort to turn the kids least likely to eat healthy, into vegetable lovers.

Audio for this feature is available here.

It’s a hot, sticky afternoon. The kind an ice cream man would buy stock in.

(SOUND: ice cream truck)

But outside the Andrew Jackson Boys and Girls Club in North Nashville the very ones who should be running up to the truck buying are selling. Selling vegetables

GOOCH: “…we’re competing against the ice cream truck and we’re winning!”

That’s Sentwuan Gooch. He and two friends are standing on the corner, signs in hand, promoting their weekly farmers market

(SOUND of kids with jingle :“Fruuuits and veggies. Fruits, fruits and veggies.”

They’re trying to get passersby to go to a small table packed with stop sign red tomatoes and shiny, green cucumbers. Ten-year-old Malaika Bolling mans the produce anxiously awaiting customers

MALAIKA: “Would I like to interest you in some vegetables. Maybe when I come out. We have um zucchini…”

Bolling is a sales natural who doesn’t take maybes.

MALAIKA: “….tomatoes, onions.
CUSTOMER: “I’ll tell you what I’m going to get me a couple of those cucumbers okay? Let me go get my money out of my car.”
MALAIKA: “Okay!”

In four of Nashville’s low income, urban neighborhoods the Veggie Project recruits 8 to 12 year olds. It tries to initiate a long lasting courtship between them and produce. Kids love the farmers markets because they get to be in charge. Project organizers purchase the fruit and vegetables in bulk from local farmers, then the bagging and selling are all left to young hands.

MALAIKA: “That will be a dollar fifty.
CUSTOMER: “You keep the change.
MALAIKA: “Thank you.”

A Vanderbilt doctoral student created the Veggie Project 3 years ago as a way to bring healthy food into areas lacking produce, and saturated with cheap junk food.
Still kids and neighborhood families won’t purchase what they don’t know. Project organizer Liz Alleman is surprised every year by how certain foods are completely foreign.

ALLEMAN: “The first time we brought blackberries to a club, especially the younger kids, who ate the kernels off the blackberries as if they were corn and by the end of the summer they knew they could just pop the blackberries in their mouth.”

The Veggie Project not only teaches kids how to eat new foods, but where it comes from.

COMMUNITY FARM VOLUNTEER: “There’s nothing on there that’s gonna hurt you.”

On a field trip to a community farm in West Nashville, boys learn how to pick kale, even the leaves that look hazardous.

COMMUNITY FARM VOLUNTEER:: “Those bugs aren’t gonna hurt you at all. Oh. They won’t bite you or anything they’re more interested in this green then they are you”

By seeing the process from start to finish, the hope is kids will find an appreciation, a reason to choose carrots over candy, and that parents and siblings will mimic those decisions, breaking old habits.

Jeff Darnell runs the Andrew Jackson Boys and Girls club. He sees kids year around and says the Veggie Project does a good job of introducing kids to good food in the summer, but then the farmers markets, the field trips, the healthy reminders fade.

DARNELL: “You’re talking about a culture. You’re telling people to stop eating fried foods, telling them to stay away from the McDonalds, the things they’ve grown up eating.”

That fast food is hard for Malaika Bolling, the star salesgirl, to resist. Over the summer she started asking her parents to buy fruits and vegetables. Now with the Veggie Project over, the fifth grader finds herself more tempted but also more in control.

MALAIKA “It’s very hard because if I see something if I see like McDonalds or Taco Bell I’ll try and ask for it, but I’ll hold myself back because I know it will get me bigger around the waist.”

According to a state survey about 30,000 school aged children in Davidson County are anywhere from a few pounds overweight to morbidly obese. Right now the Veggie Project reaches about 60 kids per year. Organizers hope to bring the program into new neighborhoods and extend it year around . They know curbing Metro’s obesity rate won’t be easy, but on a hot, sticky afternoon when the ice cream man should be the obvious choice…

Boys on the Corner: “Come today come today come today!”

…there’s satisfaction in providing some healthy competition.

Boys with new jingle: “Vegetables and fruit are good for you. Come to our market you can get this too. And everyone say….vegetables!

For Nashville Public Radio, I’m Anne Marshall.