Actress Garner brings belief in organic eating to baby food line
Jennifer Garner has returned to her farm roots to teach her children about eating healthy.
The 45-year-old actress recently launched her own organic baby food line, named Once Upon a Farm, and explains her childhood has always been an inspiration for how she wants to feed her three children with estranged husband Ben Affleck.
“My mom made all of our food,” Garner says. “I would just be desperate for anything in a package. I was so envious of my friends and their Little Debbie oatmeal cakes and things like that. When we were hungry she would say, ‘Go out to the garden, child, I bet those tomatoes are ready and grab yourself some sugar snap peas’. (Now), you know, you can’t help it. That’s what I do with my kids.”
Garner and her children also have chickens and beehives on their Los Angeles farm and she enjoys the educational value the children gain by tending to the plants and animals.
“We have chickens but that’s very Los Angeles so don’t be too impressed,” she continues. “We grow tons of fruits and vegetables because here in Los Angeles you can just grow anything. I can’t get over it. I just keep planting things.”
“It’s super fun. It’s like a living science experiment.”
And now Garner is renovating her family’s farm in Locust Grove, Okla., in the hope of turning it into a base for her organic food line and provide baby food to the Women, Infants, and Children program for low income parents.
“The first thing I said to (Once Upon a Farm CEO) John (Foraker) is we can’t just talk about feeding the top 10 per cent of kids, 50 per cent of kids, we have to talk about how to give that nutrition to the bottom half, the bottom rungs of the ladder,” she says.
“Part of my job is to educate moms what we’re doing, who we are, where we are in the grocery store, (and) why we exist.”