SPEED to TABLE
In garden, nutrition students learn to grow healthy eating habits
M EGGIE Lewellyn, a dietetic intern at the UTHealth School of Public Health, didn’t learn about gardening growing up.
She majored in nutrition in college but still didn’t really have a sense of how food was grown or where it came from.
“I never knew what a broccoli plant looked like,” she said.
All that has changed for Lewellyn and the other interns in a program at the new holistic garden that has just opened at UTHealth School of Public Health.
The garden, which is almost half the size of a football field, is filled with fruits, vegetables and herbs to help educate dietetic internship students about nutrition and to provide families of Texas Medical Center patients a place to find relief from stress. Produce harvested from the garden is prepared in a brand new, state-ofthe-art kitchen at the school and is used in healthy cooking classes for the medical center community.
The idea for the garden and nutrition initiative came from Laura Moore, the director of the dietetic internship program. The program offers a master’s degree in public health and also the dietetic internship, which allows those who complete it to take the examination to become registered dietitians. Moore came to the program in 2012 and, after some formal assessment, decided to embark upon the gardening initiative.
“We needed more hands-on training for our interns, especially around preventive health,” she said. “So, we needed to start in the gardens, basically where food comes from, then take that harvest into the kitchen and then on to the clinical setting to address nutritional deficiencies through diet.”