Brazilian schools teaching children to eat fruit and veg

fruit and veg

At a school in São Paulo City, a group of sixth graders are busy at work preparing the soil for planting. They’re armed with seeds, soil and a range of gardening tools. Upside-down soda bottles, filled with water, outline a series of rectangular garden plots. It is the second year that the school will grow their own vegetables in order to teach the students where their food comes from and promote their understanding of it.

A boy named Felipy Pigato explains, “Yesterday we mixed regular soil with coconut fiber,” he says. “The coconut fiber holds the seeds in the soil.” Today, he says they will add in the compost.

Mateus Feitosa de Almeida, 12, slowly pulls back the soil around a worm. “We have to pull like that so we don’t hurt the worms,” he explains. “If we take them out, it’s bad for the soil.”

The students are working under the guidance of two teachers, Daniel Giglio Colombo and Marta Martins.

This is the second year of the project, says Colombo, who helped start the garden. “We’re going to grow the same things we did last year — arugula, lettuce, radishes.”

The vegetables they grow are used in school meals. But the real aim of the school garden is not to supply ingredients, he says, but to teach students where food comes from, so they can develop a connection to their food.

“When we ask students where lettuce comes from, they say the market,” Colombo says. “They have lost contact with nature, the soil, sowing, and growing of crops.”

And that is reflected in their diets, he says, which are increasingly unhealthy.

Just like in the US, highly processed foods like fast food, soda, and high-fructose corn syrup have become all too popular in Brazil. And obesity rates are rising, even among children. It is a nation-wide problem that has alarmed the government and public health experts in the country. Brazil’s government has banned sodas, cakes and cookies in school meals. It has restricted the amount of salt and sugar in them as well. It also requires at least one daily serving of fruits and vegetables.

Initially, students used to reject fresh food, says Martins. She and her colleagues hoped that the school garden would change that.

That idea is behind flourishing school gardens across Brazil. The program started 12 years ago as a pilot program in five schools, as part of a project by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Program. Today, there are a few thousand school gardens in 700 cities and towns. Many are run independently by schools. Others are supported by city governments. 

It’s hard to know yet whether school gardens have improved children’s health, says Albaneide Peixinho, who ran Brazil’s school meal program for 13 years. But she says schools are reporting that the gardens have made students more aware of their food.

“With school gardens, they see that food comes from the Earth,” Peixinho says, and they are eating healthier. Some studies even show that the students are influencing how their families eat. “Parents say that the kids are eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, and they insist on eating those foods at home.”