Mt. Gilead FFA tackles old ideas about school foods

The Clyde Enterprise
Matt Reese
Jan. 24, 2012

It really is not a secret that Amer­i­cans (and Ohioans) are over­weight. Any trip to the mall, visit to a restau­rant or trip to the movies shows that, in gen­eral, there are ample expand­ing waist­lines around us.

While there are many fac­tors that have taken the blame for this, there have also been many pro­posed solu­tions to America’s weight prob­lem. A year ago, the U.S. Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture pub­lished a pro­posed rule to update the nutri­tion stan­dards for meals served through the National School Lunch and School Break­fast pro­grams as part of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. The pro­posed changes to school meal stan­dards add more fruits, veg­eta­bles, whole grains, fat-free and low-fat milk to school meals. Schools would also be required to limit the lev­els of sat­u­rated fat, sodium, calo­ries, and trans fats in meals.

Man­dat­ing health­ier foods is a great step, but the Ohio Small Grains Mar­ket­ing Pro­gram (OSGMP) decided to take things one-step fur­ther by work­ing with edu­ca­tion con­sul­tants to change stu­dents’ behav­iors and atti­tudes about their food choices.

“Rather than us writ­ing a cur­ricu­lum and hand­ing it to them hop­ing that they would do some­thing with it, we brought a team of teach­ers together from Mt. Gilead, which was the first school we approached,” said Carol Warken­tien, one of the OSGMP edu­ca­tion con­sul­tants. “We laid out some of the chal­lenges we would be fac­ing if we wanted to bring kids along with this notion.”

The ini­tial meet­ing led to a deci­sion to con­sult the stu­dents them­selves on the best ways to shape their atti­tudes and behav­iors about their foods. Soon, the Mt. Gilead FFA was work­ing to change atti­tudes about food in the school. The FFA stu­dents started by mak­ing a video in the school cafeteria.

“The stu­dents did a video in their own high school lunch­room and asked other stu­dents what they thought about their healthy lunch. Of course there was some hilar­ity in the inter­views, but there is also an aware­ness of some of the gaps in stu­dent knowl­edge of and under­stand­ing about their food,” said Jeanne Gogol­ski, another OSGMP edu­ca­tion con­sul­tant work­ing on the project. “One of the prime ath­letes at the school ate an entire pack of Oreo cook­ies for lunch. Nat­u­rally that pro­duces some con­ver­sa­tion about what it takes to have a healthy lunch.”

As a fol­low up to the video, the Mt, Gilead health class posted some nutri­tion infor­ma­tion in the lunch­room list­ing the calo­ries in some of the lunch food. The school also had a whole grains taste test event where stu­dents rated whole grain snacks and chose their favorites to include on the school menu to help reach the USDA requirements.

The Mt. Gilead FFA stu­dents also used their cafe­te­ria video at some events to gen­er­ate inter­est from other FFA chap­ters in their “Food for Thought Chal­lenge.” For the student-created chal­lenge, the OSGMP gave out $500 schol­ar­ships to nine Ohio FFA chap­ters (includ­ing Mt. Gilead) to help them develop a nutri­tional aware­ness cam­paign about healthy food choices for their fel­low students.

Each par­tic­i­pat­ing chap­ter will make a pre­sen­ta­tion at the Ohio FFA Con­ven­tion next May and the win­ning chap­ter will receive $2,000 from the OSGMP. Par­tic­i­pat­ing FFA chap­ters sub­mit­ted cam­paign entries in Sep­tem­ber and were selected in Octo­ber based on the orig­i­nal­ity of their cam­paign ideas.

The par­tic­i­pat­ing Food for Thought FFA chap­ters have already begun imple­ment­ing their cam­paigns, which include pro­mot­ing the use of stu­dent food logs, orga­niz­ing edu­ca­tional fairs with health-related groups and pro­vid­ing healthy snacks between classes. Along with Mt. Gilead, the par­tic­i­pat­ing FFA Chap­ters are: Ridge­mont, North­west­ern, Clear Fork, Lon­don, Miami East, Ridgedale, North Union, and Twin Val­ley South.

“The schools’ progress will be mon­i­tored through­out the year as they launch a pro­gram in the school. The win­ner that can best show that they changed atti­tudes and behav­iors in their dis­trict will win the award,” Warken­tien said. “We think inter­est will be even higher next year. It is kind of fun and it has got­ten kids work­ing within their own dis­tricts and they are reach­ing out to younger kids in the dis­trict as well. Kids can be very inno­v­a­tive and cre­ative and they are going to come up with a lot of ideas that can be shared around the state.”

The nutri­tional pos­si­bil­i­ties are lim­ited only by the expand­ing imag­i­na­tions of FFA stu­dents around the state — and imag­i­na­tions are much more ben­e­fi­cial to expand than waistlines.

This col­umn is brought to you by Ohio agri­cul­ture. Matt Reese writes for Ohio’s Coun­try Jour­nal and resides in Bal­ti­more, Ohio. Con­tact him at mkcreese@yahoo.com. For more, visit fresh­count ryair.blogspot.com.