Mind and Body Health | Page 5

either cause health or disease and I believe the more people that educate about this concept, the more we can not only take care of the health of our bodies but it will create healthier communities. I believe that we can end up solving a lot of problems that exist today through educating about food.

"I believe that we can end up solving a lot of problems that exist today through educating about food."

What are you hoping that the community will gain or learn by coming to these gatherings?

I hope to teach the community how to make healthy choices about food for their bodies; that’s number one. Then there is something called the seven social determinants of health, and one of them, in simplest terms, is the process of coming together to create a positive, endorphin releasing experience. Even just saying hello to your local farmer once a week creates these relationships that have been shown to strengthen people's health. It also then shows that when we ban together, we can actually create positive change, and that is pretty interesting to me. So through education, I’m trying to enable people to understand that if we each do a little bit to help the environment, which helps our local food then we can change the world. So that’s how I try to link food to the body, to the community, to the environment and to the world.

In your own findings, have you seen any differences in the community so far?

Yes, I have seen a lot of these differences. There has been an increase in the number of farms, the number growing from two farms to sixteen in the small town of Truro. The farmers’ market coalition was created to help other farmers’ markets educate and offer nutrition incentives so that people of all different income levels can afford their farmers market. And since the start, we have gone from one market offering nutrition incentives and being a part of our coalition now to six markets offering the nutrition incentive.

We also now offer programs that help low income people afford the local food. So we’ve brought government and state funding to the area, that then goes to our local people to enable them to buy the local food so that not only helps that socioeconomic group become healthier, it also increases the farmers income. And then we’ve seen a demand for our educational programs so we started off helping one school and now were helping seven schools and we consult with many more beyond that.