Healthy Kitchens and Cooking for Nutrition

Wow!  It’s fantastic how the Seeds staff and women participants in our Clean Kitchens and Cooking for Nutrition Program have been working together, including creating recipe books that help each other and their community.  As an important supporter, you can take pride in knowing your donation has helped provide the resources they need to share skills, knowledge -- and of course, nutritious recipes -- to improve the diets of their families. Culture, heritage, new ideas and fun, all blended with determination to fight child and mother malnutrition.   

To further share what they have learned, the women have compiled an easy-to-use recipe book focused on healthy and nutritious beverages – Frescos and Atoles.  The Seeds team has held numerous field days with small groups of participating women where they share recipes for frescos made with chaya (a high-nutrition local plant), carrots and beets, to name just a few.  Everyone gets a chance to make one or more of these delicious drinks, and to have a taste of each one.  

Later on, when our staff continues its regular household visits, they'll encourage the participants and their extended families to prepare these frescos and atoles -- especially for their children -- for three reasons:

1. they cost less than commercial soft drinks and sodas
2. they avoid health risks of commercial soft drinks and sodas,
3. and most important, they provide nutrition as well as cool sweet enjoyment!

Thanks to supporters like you, we help hundreds of women discover that they can take the initiative to help their family and spread the word throughout their communities. This is self-help at its best!  Many have had little opportunity for education or for learning experiences outside the home.  It has been very empowering for them to learn via Seeds’ programs that they can take actions in their own homes that will be beneficial for their children and families, with foods and beverages that are easy to prepare, delicious to eat or drink, and made from ingredients they have grown in their own home gardens.  And because our staff members are from the same villages, the women can see it is possible for them to become leaders as well.  

We need your continuing support, so the Seeds local team can continue to make all these great things happen. Check out the beautiful new recipe book at the link below -- your gift will help us print enough copies so more and more women can have one in their kitchen. 

We also use your support to pay the staff that makes the follow-up visits, fund the field days and group education meetings, and make sure rural families are learning how to protect themselves against malnutrition and give their children a good start in life!

Thank you for your support!

Links:

• Cookbook for Frescos & Atoles