Healthy Food Program
At our home site in Madison County, North Carolina, PAGE is connecting Appalachian-grown foods with learning opportunities for girls. Through our Healthy Food Program initiative, we hope to address food insecurity through high-quality meals, and education about local, seasonal, and culturally-diverse foods.
Food has the power to nourish our bodies, hearts, communities, and land. In PAGE, we understand that the meals we eat can connect us with each other, open up new worlds and opportunities, and fuel our physical and emotional growth. And, of course, we want our food to taste delicious too!
We take great care in the food we provide for our Summer and After School Programs. During the Summer, we offer PAGE participants, interns, and staff two homemade meals each day, planned and prepared by our talented and loving “Kitchen Angels.” Lindsay Montgomery has been leading the PAGE Food Program since 2021. She plans meals thoughtfully, sourcing local and seasonal ingredients when possible, and providing options that fulfill our diverse health needs and tastes. Teresa Decker, Priscilla Boles and Kristie Norwood lovingly and skillfully prepare and serve the food each day. During the After School Program in the Fall and Spring, Coordinator Debbie Chandler prepares healthy snacks for each session, ensuring that our participants have the sustenance they need to learn and grow.
​
At PAGE, we connect food to our educational mission in creative ways. Outside in the Heritage Garden and Permaculture Orchard, for example, we can harvest greens, berries, and eggs! Students learn techniques to incorporate these ingredients into simple snacks like pasta with compound butter, or “yard sauce” served with eggs and biscuits. In the Summer, girls have used herbs from the garden to decorate focaccia bread during our Craft Fair Day. We have also done more in-depth food-related projects through our Story Labs, like the Appalachian Foodways Oral History project, where girls interviewed local women about making and growing food and learned new technology skills to transform their interviews and photographs into multimedia oral histories. With our increasing focus on STEAM learning, we intend to offer more opportunities for girls to utilize the garden and orchard as classrooms where they can explore plant science, soil health, and pollinator habitats, topics that explore our interconnectedness to the natural world.
​
Through efforts such as these, we hope to help a new generation of adolescent girls and young women envision the food traditions they can create – for themselves and their future families.