Sweet Potato Month

As a FoodCorps Service Member, my daily goal is to connect kids to healthy food in three ways: garden engagement, hands-on nutrition education, and access to fresh, local food at school. The sweet potato has proved to be the most versatile of vegetables to achieve this goal, which is no surprise because it is the most famous of North Carolina’s crops.

I serve in 20 classrooms across five schools- that’s over 300 kids per week! In order to make my time most meaningful to so many unique kids, I have implemented the three-pronged approach to a specific vegetable or fruit each month, which coincides with Guilford County School’s “Food Focus” (see lunch menu). With sweet potatoes featured in November, students were able to harvest the produce they had grown in their very own gardens. At Fairview Elementary, third graders dug 28 pounds of sweet potatoes from a 4’X4’ garden plot! We left our bounty to cure in the classrooms in paper bags for a couple weeks and then as Thanksgiving drew near, we got cooking!

With portable cooking equipment donated from All Clad cookware, I’m able to bring a mobile kitchen of sorts into the classroom. For November, I prepared a cooking demonstration for mashed sweet potatoes. Students took part in the mixing and mashing of ingredients, and took home a hand-made recipe card to share with family for the holiday. Most students enjoyed the natural sweetness of the mashed sweet potatoes, but most importantly, everyone gave it a try!

Students at Oak Hill Elementary experienced sweet potatoes in a new way at lunch—a tasting table was set up serving raw sweet potato sticks with tzatziki Greek yogurt dip. The 100 pounds of taters were donated from Farmer Larry of Troxler Farms in Browns Summit. Students were willing to try this different snack, and many came back begging for the recipe! Upon leaving the lunchroom, students were able to share their preferences with us via a sticker voting board.

Local sweet potatoes were featured on GCS lunch lines on November 30 and it was fantastic to see many kids choose them, perhaps due in part to their month-long sweet potato education.