R
esearch has proven the value of sharing meals as a family and has shown that food prepared at home is usually more nutritious and healthier for us. However, some families lack cooking skills, many families live on tight budgets and need to learn ways to conserve food dollars, and also busy schedules provide barriers to getting the family fed a nutritious meal each day. These are the kinds of issues we intend to address with the programs we offer. Here are some recent examples.
Choose Wisely for Health and Wealth – offered as part of our “Learning for Better Living” event in Parsons, emphasized the proven link between healthy lifestyle choices and our risk for chronic diseases. We gave some tools for helping make wiser choices and offered comparisons as visual reminders of the huge difference our choices can make in our meals, our wallets, and our health.
Meals In Minutes – was part of a series of “Parenting Under Pressure” programs agents are providing for parents of children involved in the Independence Kids CREW After-School Program. This lesson offered tips to help save time as well as money while getting healthy meals on the table quickly so families could eat meals together at home more often rather than finding themselves in the fast food drive-through.
Food insecurity was an even greater concern during the recent government shut down which interrupted the flow of SNAP-Ed funds to recipient families. Some outcomes of a brainstorming session among our FCS agents and nutrition assistants to address this issue were that I was able to provide our Independence Community Access Center (CAC) with Food Budgeting fact sheets to share with their clients. The CAC is a centralized location in Montgomery County for many types of resources including food, and this seemed an ideal place to place this information which they willingly received. During my most recent visit to the CAC, I was told that our information had worked out well for them and that people were using it. “Stretching Your Food Budget” was also the topic of my newspaper and newsletter columns this month as well as the subject of my radio spot.
Offering activities in food preparation creates life-long skills and we recently had the opportunity to provide these for some elementary school students. In Coffeyville, we shared about dairy farming and made butter with around 150 students. In Independence, our team promoted K-State by sharing flour milled at our K-State Flour Mill as we assisted around 150 students in making their own individual loaves of bread. We are scheduled to make bread and butter and share a lesson on grains with Cherryvale students coming up in April.
Farmers markets provide a great source of fresh fruits and vegetables to local families. As a member of the Regional Farmer’s Market Vendor Workshop Planning Committee, I was able to assist with hosting the 2019 event held in Parsons. Local vendors had the opportunity to learn about planning for, growing, and marketing their crops as well as learning food safety information all of which will help provide more fresh and safe produce families can include in their meals.