In this blog post, the second in our series recognizing National American Indian Heritage Month, Ashley and Shannon, our partners from the Arizona Department of Education, write about local ingredients and their importance, especially when planning lunches for kids at school. Read below about how this idea made for a celebration over a bowl of beans!
The Arizona Department of Education (ADE) was awarded a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Fiscal Year 2021 Team Nutrition Training Grant, which supports the development of standardized recipes for school meal programs that feature locally grown ingredients. All recipes standardized under the grant will feature unique, local, and native foods that meet the National School Lunch Program’s nutrition requirements while considering modest food costs. Additionally, these recipes consider the limited equipment available in many school kitchens for scratch cooking. ADE is utilizing this grant to launch Kitchen Creations, a project intended to provide Arizona schools with recipes that have been developed with Arizona K-12 meal service professionals and are student tested and approved. For ADE, the most rewarding aspect of the Kitchen Creations project is the opportunity for the state agency to learn more about the cultural connections that impact student food choices and support entities serving Arizona’s students.
You would not think that serving a simple meal such as a bowl of beans would warrant a celebration, but in Salt River Schools (SRS), it does!
The students seem to enjoy seeing a familiar food item on their lunch tray, beans are a family favorite in most Salt River homes. The children might not fully understand the importance of the tepary bean or the fact that it was a food their ancestors planted, harvested and survived on, they just know it tastes good. Participating in the Kitchen Creations Project has been an exciting venture, because it gives SRS a greater opportunity to educate the students on the nutritional value of our traditional foods, and with that education hopefully, will come change, a change to eating more of the foods our elders, change to a healthier people.
Choosing healthy foods can change the course of our future to a heathier community, a community without diabetes, depending on medications, long lives without pain and suffering diabetes and other diseases that plague our families.
This project has also inspired a sense of pride in the community, much like the students when they see a bowl of beans on their tray, it is a part of our himdag (way of life) and to be sharing it with others is a thing of value, because we recognize the importance of sharing good food.
Programs like Kitchen Creations encourage incorporation of traditionally important foods into the systems that feed Arizonans. Read more about how a program at ADE that helped a school on the Navajo Nation in the next post of this continuing series.
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