RFK Jr. Highlights School Gardens and Fresh Lunches in Kern County

Hi, I'm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., your HHS secretary, and I'm here in Kern County, California with Congressman Vince Fong and with Dylan Wilson, who is from the Grimm Family Education Foundation.

And the foundation operates three schools in the county, charter public schools, and each have edible gardens, and the gardens are integrated into every aspect of their education. But also, the children learn to eat good food, learn to make it themselves in a learning kitchen, and then bring it home to their families.

What Grimm Public Schools have done is taken nutrition, taken fresh food, and, and put it into the curriculum.

So we're teaching kids, but those kids are now taking those, uh, lifestyle habits of healthy foods to their homes.

To me, one of the most impressive things about these schools is they also have a cafeteria where they feed hundreds and hundreds of kids.

So they're purchasing good, fresh produce from outside of the school, and they're doing it for the same price that California public schools allocate for school children all over the state that get lousy food.

And what they've shown is that in math and sciences, these kids are 15 points ahead of their peer schools.

And the parents report that the behavioral issues are m- much, much better in these schools.

You know, we're working now on the federal level to make sure that the 30 million school lunches that we pay for every day at the federal level are also gonna be fresh produce, and this is a template for how to do it right.

We wanna make sure that we can see our children become healthy, become healthy citizens and healthy eaters, and we can only do that through integrated approaches with garden, kitchen, and scratch-cooking lunch programs.

So here we are, seeing children eat real food.

Well, thank you for being an example to the rest of the state and for the federal government.

Produced by the US Department of Health and Human Services.