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 Calthorpe Coordinator Lousie Gates and volunteer Rowan St Clair selling organic veg |
Grow a healthy lifestyle
Community project encouraging healthier eating with veg garden
THE lack of large supermarkets in the King’s Cross area selling fresh fruit and vegetables has led to one community project tackling the problem by handing out seeds and spades and telling people to grow their own.
The Calthorpe Project, on Gray’s Inn Road, has turned a section of its community garden over to groups of eight local women to plant crops.
The centre, which also boasts a cooking school, crèche, football pitches and playground among the winding paths that criss-cross the two-acre site, has recruited parents through the area’s Sure Start children’s scheme to encourage healthier eating.
As well as growing crops, the parents are given a six-week cookery course on how to prepare dishes made from the vegetables they have grown and use pulses and grains. They can also order regular cheap organic food boxes from a supplier that provides a stall of food for the centre’s volunteers to man.
Calthorpe worker Rina Choudhari is helping a group of Bangladeshi women who live near by grow their own food. This includes vegetables native to Asia that the women would have had difficulty finding in local shops. She said: “There are lots of projects aimed at Bengali men, but not for women, and not this kind of practical advice.”
“As well as tackling issues about poor diet, it has helped people get out and make new friends.”
Sessions involve making cuttings from herb plants and re-potting them to take home. They also are hard at work harvesting crops in the poly tunnels, which include crops important to Bangladeshi cookery: chillies, titt corowla – which is similar to okra – and a seed pod called kadu.
Ms Choudhari added: “We thought: we have this land so let’s do something more with it. It has been a success so far.”
Mila Campoy runs macrobiotic cooking classes for other groups. Over the past two years, she has given cookery lessons to over 200 people.
She said: “We are encouraging people to grow their own food, teach local people about organic food and their diet.
“We aim to teach people how to cook vegetables they have grown. It is about increasing the understanding of how diet is linked to health.” |
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