LIFE, DEATH & LEMON MUFFINS
Can teaching kids to grow carrots and cook kale save the planet? Kim Knight reports from Garden to Table’s Root to Tip competition.
Can teaching kids to grow carrots and cook kale save the planet? Kim Knight reports from Garden to Table’s Root to Tip competition.
The chrysalis was stone-cold coal black. Nearby, the children had found a butterfly with a hole in its wing.
The sun was shining and the birds were singing but down in the garden it had all gone a bit existential.
“Sometimes when butterflies are born at the end of the season, when it’s very cold, sometimes they have defects,” said Caroline McCartney. “Also, they don’t live very long. Maybe it is at the end of its life?”
The small girls frowned. Then they planted carrots.
Garden to Table is a primary school programme that teaches kids to grow, harvest and cook food. It is death and life and later there might be lemon muffins.
Three-quarters of all of the food sold around the world is processed. In developed countries, processed food accounts for between 40 and 75 per cent of nutrition and energy intakes. New Zealand scores relatively highly for fresh fruit and vegetable consumption but latest figures show 63 per cent of us still fail to eat the recommended five or more serves a day.
Did you know you can eat kumara leaves? That if you cut a spring onion 2cm from its base and rehydrate the roots, you can plant it again? That if you blitz raw pumpkin peel with plain biscuits and butter, you can bake a pretty decent pie crust?
In the Maungawhau School garden in Mt Eden, the pineapple sage is flowering neon red and the wax-eyes are having a go at the citrus. A 9-year-old has just pulled up a full-grown carrot.
“What does it smell like?” asks McCartney, the school’s garden specialist. “Fresh,” says one child. “Like a carrot,” says another. Did you know that if you wash and dry and finely chop a carrots feathery green tips you can combine them with coriander and make a dipping sauce for vegetable-stuffed dumplings?
The average New Zealand household wastes $1071 worth of food annually. About one-eighth of what we buy to eat is eventually thrown out. The worst offenders are Millennials, who bin 15 per cent of their weekly food shop, closely followed by Centennials on 14 per cent. Baby Boomers (the generation born between 1946 and 1964) waste just 8 per cent.
Research by online rural bank RaboDirect found lifestyle and age play a role in food budgeting.
“It’s often presumed younger generations are more environmentally conscious,” says chief