Promoting Healthy Eating in Schools

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.