We are what we eat. Unfortunately, we don't always make the best food choices. Sometimes it's simply a lack of will power. In communities struggling with high poverty rates, it's often the result of low incomes and limited food options. Dangerously high obesity rates, especially among youth, are a major public health concern in the United States.
The health of California youth reflects this disturbing national trend. To address the challenge of childhood obesity statewide, the California 4-H Food Smart Families program will be implemented at four sites in Fresno, Orange, Sutter-Yuba and Tulare counties this year. Additional UC partners will include the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP) and...
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
If it's Super Bowl time (and it is on Sunday, Feb. 1, when the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots clash for the National Football League championship), it's also time for a "Souper Bowl."
A souper bowl of chili, that is.
Question is, which recipe to prepare? Well, the Solano County 4-H Youth Development Program to the rescue.
Every year the Solano County 4-H Project Skills Day includes a Solano County 4-H Chili Cookoff. Teams sign up, prepare their chili in advance, and transport it in a crockpot or slow cooker to the venue (this year it was the C. A. Jacobs Middle School in Dixon). They field questions from the judges,...
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
What does it take to win the best-of-show award for baked goods at a county fair?
Well, if you're Angelina Gonzalez, an alumnus of the Sherwood Forest 4-H Club, Vallejo, and now the Solano County's 4-H SET (Science, Engineering and Technology) Program representative, sometimes practice makes perfect, and sometimes perfect doesn't need practice.
Gonzalez's salted caramel butter bars swept all five awards in the adult baked goods section of the 2014 Solano County Fair. Judges first awarded the bars a blue ribbon, and then best-of-division, followed by...
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
There’s an old saying that “4-H isn’t just about cows and chickens.”
Well, sometimes (tongue in cheek), it’s also about chili!
As in chili cookoffs.
Every year since 2005, the Solano County 4-H Youth Development Program has sponsored a Chili Cookoff Contest as part of its Project Skills Day, where the youths share what they’ve learned in their projects. The scores of projects generally fall under the wide umbrellas of animal sciences, biological sciences, civic engagement, communication and expressive arts, community and volunteer service, environmental education and earth sciences, health, leadership and personal development, personal safety, physical...
- Author: Rose Hayden-Smith
“The school garden has come to stay.”
In 1909, Ventura schoolteacher Zilda M. Rogers wrote to the Agricultural Experiment Station at the University of California, Berkeley, then the flagship agricultural campus for California’s land grant institution, and a primary proponent and provider of garden education resources for schoolteachers. Rogers wrote in some detail about how her school garden work had progressed, what the successes and failures were, how the children were responding to the opportunity to garden, how her relationship with the children had changed as a result of the garden work, and what she saw as potential for the future.
“With the love of the school garden has grown the desire...