Everyone knows that vegetables are good for you and that we’re supposed to be healthy. But actually eating healthy vegetables can be a challenge.
The Great Basin Community Food Co-op and Urban Roots Garden Classrooms recently teamed up to put on a workshop for several local families to learn how to plan nutritional meals on a budget. The families involved in the workshop had to have children who had already participated in either Farm Camp or Farm School at Urban Roots, and they received yearlong memberships and $50 grocery food stipends for use at GBCFC after the workshop.
Cheryl Skibicki of Urban Roots said that the workshop served as the link between what the kids were learning in the class and the parents. It brought the families together to learn how to plan and prepare their meals. The workshop included a tour of the co-op and activities to help plan meals.
“I created two different exercises,” GBCFC marketing outreach coordinator Meghan Collins said. “The first one is aimed more at being creative and discovering something new. What’s new to discover is different kinds of vegetables that grow in the Great Basin and then putting them together into a recipe that might suit the different seasons. The other will involve also looking at the herbs and spices that we have. They can be fresh or in bulk. This is about doing a bit of multiplication and working out the quantities and costs of different ingredients.”
Collins recommends that families buy in bulk when feasible because it tends to be cheaper in the long run. She also said an important factor in planning nutritional meals is to use foods that are in season not only because buying what’s in season is cheaper, but also because they taste better and are better for you.
“If you’re looking at it from a freshness point of view, everything that’s in season is going to be fresher because if you’re buying apples or strawberries out of season, they had to select for those traits in those strawberries,” Collins said. “They’re selected for a second harvest, or they’ve vacuum-packed those apples or bananas so that they last longer, but some of the nutrients start to break down over time, and it doesn’t taste as good.
“Seasonal things don’t have to be brought from far away, so sometimes if we want apples in January, we import them from the Southern Hemisphere. So the food miles start to add up and that’s a burden on non-renewable resources and things like that.”
In the fall, apples, basil, squash, tomatoes, lettuce and potatoes—among many other foods—are in season in the Great Basin. A quick search online will give you more information about when certain crops are in season.
That’s also part of the reason that Collins said using locally grown products in meals is important, too. Buying and eating local is a great way to help your own community and the environment. There are farmers’ markets throughout the year all over town, and GBCFC offers products from many local farmers. Everything local is labeled with a green tag in the store.
“One dollar spent locally is likely to circulate so many more times here versus if we spend a dollar at a store owned elsewhere, the chances of that money leaving the community is a lot greater,” Collins said. “And we’re supporting our local farmers who are generally smaller scale, and smaller scale agriculture tends to be more sustainable.”