We here at FoodPlay Productions are excited to help launch this year’s Food Day! For the last 30 years, we’ve been touring schools and community events throughout the country using the power of live theater, fantastic feats of juggling, music, magic, and audience participation to help turn kids on to healthy eating and active living. Our approach—empower kids with the skills needed to see through media messages and take charge of growing up healthy and fit.

Our programs are designed to help get everyone at school – kids, teachers, parents, food service, health staff, administrators, and community members, excited and on board to work together to create healthy schools. The most exciting part of it all is that we’ve learned that kids can be the best health advocates for themselves, their families, their schools, and their communities, once they’re given the information in a way that speaks their language! So, the more fun, the better!

FOODPLAY’S 7 Strategies to Turn Kids on to Healthy Eating:

1. Find out where kids are at, and start there.
2. Live it, don’t preach it.
3. Show, don’t tell.
4. Arm kids with the consumer skills needed to make sense of a confusing food marketplace.
5. Make connections.
6. Engage all the senses in food discovery with growing, cooking, and tasting!
7. Make good eating great fun

There are lots of ways to celebrate National Food Day—here are just a few from FoodPlay:

• Have healthy snack demonstrations in classrooms, cafeterias, community centers, or at a food fair. Create snack stations where people walk from station to station, creating and tasting healthy snacks. You can print out, cut, and distribute a set of “Fresh Adventure!” fruit and veggie snack recipe cards from our website.
• Create a community celebration with a local farm, farmers market, CSA, or food co-op. Make a skit or live performance with fun fruit and veggie costumes; create a variety show; do take-offs on popular songs; promote the special benefits of your favorite healthy foods or healthy farm practices. Learn how to juggle here!
• Create a Junk Food Hall of Shame or Good Food Hall of Fame—a fun exhibit showcasing the best and brightest foods and practices of a healthy food supply produced in a sustainable, humane way. Similarly, the Hall of Shame can showcase the worst abuses in our food supply. A great book for young people to read for interesting facts on the food industry is Janey Junkfood’s Fresh Adventure!
• Get kids excited to go for fruits and veggies with fun hands-on tools like Tracker Bands and Passports to Fresh Adventures! You can order these at our website, and we can put your special logo and messaging on them for quantity orders.

Barbara Storper, MS, RD, is Founder and Executive Director of FoodPlay Productions since 1982. A national leader in the field of children’s nutrition, Barbara combines her background in journalism, theater arts, and nutrition to write, direct, and produce FoodPlay Productions’ evidence-based national touring theater shows.