Archive: Around Town

Next month kids will learn to eat green at two 'Operation Eat Green' camp sessions offered by the Lansing Recreation Department.  Nutrition Counselor Tara Gross will teach campers how to understand food labels, choose healthy foods that are good for people and the Earth, and how to cook them.

"We're going to alk about things like what foods have the least amounts of toxins in them and why that is important to our bodies and to the Earth," Gross says.  "It will cover all aspects of eating green."

Gross is a Lansing nutritional counselor, whose business, Wholly Greens, specializes in matching food choices to individual body needs.  She works with families to determine what meal plans work best for them.  She often works with an acupuncturist and a chiropractor to enhance healthy eating.

Each camp session will meet at the Lansing Community Center for five days, from 9am to 1pm.  Mornings campers will discuss the kinds of foods they like and are healthy.  They will also begin cook all their foods, which they will bring to the farms so they have lunch with them that they have prepared themselves.  They will also learn about journaling and how that helps to decide what foods are healthy and which they like.

"I always tell kids it takes 25 times before you like something, so try it agin.  A lot of times it's about trying it different ways, trying it with different flavors, or changing the visual component of it.  If you can make it in a creative way they may like it."

Campers will visit three local farms and cook food from each farm those three days.  They will cook organic meat and dairy products from the Scheffler Farm, organic vegetables from the Thompson Farm, and Keeley's Cheese at McGarr Farms.  On another day Amie Hamlin of the NY Coalition for Healthy School Food will offer workshops on plant-based diet, and the fifth day will be used for food experiments.


"I find if kids are presented with it they start understanding at age seven,"Gross says.  "They are starting to form their ideas about what they like and don't like, so if they are presented with (the idea of what is good for them) they'll go with it.  If they're not presented with it they may not think about it until they go to college, or beyond college.  Then they don't know what to do.  I am trying to start them thinking about it at an earlier age, so when they cook for themselves at college they'll take a more holistic approach to what they eat."

Gross plans food experiments like calculating the cholesterol content of foods, and which have good and bad cholesterols.  Another will show how using a whole egg works better than just the white when mixing with oil and water.

"Eating green prepares them so they won't have health issues later in life.  There is an environmental component as well.  We have so many toxins in our foods today.  From 14 to 16 they're still finding out what they like.  They have a more fine-tuned palate at that point."

The camp sessions are scheduled for the weeks of August 20th and 27th.

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