HEALTHY. Sustainable. Affordable. Fair. (Part IV)

We've spent the last two days preparing kits to go out to all the preschools, Head Start centers, and state preschools in the DNATL world. Almost 400 preschoolers will take part in a Food Day activity celebrating healthy eating.

We packed boxes with copies of Lois Ehlert's Eating the Alphabet, tangerines, bananas, and Potter the Otter: A Tale About Water books. We started delivering the boxes this afternoon, and by the end of the day tomorrow, preschools in Smith River, Crescent City, Klamath, and the upper Yurok Reservation will all have their kits for Food Day. It's an amazing start.

Our kits are a gentle introduction to the concepts of eating HEALTHY. They'll be making banana ghosts and tangerine pumpkins, and then eating the fresh fruit treats. Potter, in his newest book, will be teaching about healthy eating and active living. Everyone will learn about the benefits of drinking water over sugar-sweetened beverages and juice.

A lot of our nation has moved away from cooking at home, from scratch, using real, whole ingredients. Part of our Food Day schedule involves reteaching skills that have slipped out of everyday American lives. Food made from scratch is generally lower in added fats, sugar, and salt than heavily processed foods.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of conflicting advice about what constitutes a "healthy diet" and I won't enter that fray here. Also? We're a little busy counting tangerines and Potter the Otter stickers. But our ever wonderful Director of Nutrition for the Del Norte Unified School District sent me a link for an awfully cute Bugs Bunny cartoon about healthy eating, and I thought I'd share that with you. It doesn't cover every base, but it's a start.

That's all, folks!