Schoolchildren learn about nutrition at Hunger Task Force

Third and fourth-graders jumped out of their school bus and filed through the snow in West Milwaukee on a November morning with one goal: to make whole-grain pizza.

The children had come from the Escuela Vieau public school in Milwaukee to the Hunger Task Force’s headquarters at 5000 W. Electric Ave. as part of the food bank’s nutrition education program.

For fifteen years, HTF has supplied its nutrition education curriculum to teachers at local schools with high participation in the free and reduced lunch program. The curriculum includes classroom lessons, a take-home cookbook, and two field trips: to the 208-acre HTF farm in Franklin, and to the headquarters’ community kitchen.

Inside the kitchen, kids took their places at stations equipped with whole-grain tortillas, spinach, bell peppers, shredded cheese and tomato sauce while an instructor demonstrated the simple recipe via overhead screen.

“A lot of the time, I feel like our kids order pizza out,” said their teacher, Sarah Kuchar. “But today, they get to learn how to make a pizza from scratch, in a healthy way, so they get to try out one of their favorite foods, but a healthier version of it.”

In the kitchen, one boy made his pizza with just pepperoni and cheese, skipping the vegetables. A girl seated nearby made an elaborate Christmas tree pizza, with spinach needles and bell pepper ornaments. She said if she could eat any food for dinner that day, it would be ice cream — but that she now knows it’s not healthy.

Kuchar said healthy versions of beloved treats — muffins loaded with nuts and apples, for example — are effective at familiarizing children with nutrition. She also said her class takes the lessons to heart.

“I came into the room with a soda, and they’re like ‘Ms. Kuchar, you shouldn’t be drinking that!’” she recounted.

After learning that cereal is high in sugar, her students started asking why it’s being served in their school cafeteria.

“I was like, well, sometimes it’s OK to eat cereal,” she said. “They have definitely questioned the food lunches before.”

Program responds to health inequities

Jonathan Hansen, chief strategy officer of the Hunger Task Force, said the nutrition education program is designed to reach low-income families.

Hansen said one reason for that is the prevalence of food deserts in many Milwaukee neighborhoods.

“Oftentimes, the only options in many of those neighborhoods are corner stores and markets that have, typically, very high-priced food that’s very low-quality,” he said.

The program emphasizes healthy foods that are affordably priced.

Kuchar said any classroom stands to benefit from nutrition education. But she said it may be more important in urban neighborhoods, where many families don’t have cars and may have to make bigger efforts to reach grocery stores.

“A lot of families in our area, we might use carpooling, we might use the bus,” she said. “So I do think in suburban areas it might be easier to get access to healthier foods.”

The program is part of the food bank’s broader focus on nutrition. The food bank does nutrition training with volunteers at the 70 local food pantries and soup kitchens it supplies.

The take-home cookbooks distributed to schoolchildren are meant to promote healthy eating at home.

“It can bring families together around the dinner table, the lunch table or the breakfast table,” he said, adding that HTF strives to make recipes reflect the cultural diversity of its customers. Recent entries in their online recipe archive include West African jollof rice, Filipino turkey giniling and an Arabic salad.

Kuchar says her students have tried the HTF recipes at home before. She said the cookbook is written in English and Spanish.