006: Inspiring Kids to Eat Vegetables with Amber Stott

Power of the Pivot Podcast

We all love good food, but did you know that what people eat during their younger years can hugely impact their eating habits and choices in the long run? If you want kids to be healthy, you gotta start them young.

This existing problem is what Amber Stott wants to address through food and nutrition literacy programs. Listen to how she talks passionately about the importance of childhood nutrition in schools.

She also speaks about the unfamiliarity of people on local produce, her experiences with nonprofit organizations and food banks like Freedom from Hunger, working with nutrition and education experts and world-renowned chefs like Jaime Oliver and Alice Waters, and the hopes in building a cooking school integrated with the usual classroom schedule in the near future.

Amber Stott is a food activist and author who founded the nonprofit Food Literacy Center, focused on educating and changing the kids’ attitude towards food. She also started farm to school state-wide programs and pushed forward a resolution declaring every September as Food Literacy Month in California.

Show Highlights:

[18:55] There’s only 4% of the kids in America, in all of America, we only have 4% of kids who eat the recommended amount of daily vegetables.

[25:06] Food Literacy Center’s approach was always not to reverse childhood obesity but to get out in front of it, same as what we’re doing in Covid. We wanted to prevent childhood obesity in the kids that we serve, we don’t want them to ever face that problem.

[38:10] This is about raising the bar of the importance of food literacy education within the school system. Food education is as important as science and reading and math and that’s the kind of systems change that we ultimately want to see.

Guest Links:

Amber Stott wrote a hands-on guide book for children entitled ‘Food Anatomy Activities for Kids: Fun, Hands-On Learning’ and talks about how people can use food to make the world a better place in her podcast called Raising Kale. You can donate and volunteer in the Food Literacy Center here.

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