Can you think of a fruit or vegetable for every color of the rainbow? Laura Ann Pollack, who works at Healthy Chesapeake, can. And she is encouraging kids to “try the rainbow” in a food program she started called Color Your Plate.
Pollack works for the Virginia-based nonprofit as a chef through a homeless shelter called ForKids, which provides emergency housing to families and children. As a chef, and of Vietnamese descent, Pollack strives to incorporate Vietnamese cuisine into the meals she cooks, so that the kids she serves can gain both a nutritious meal and an introduction to a new cultural cuisine.
Pollack, who grew up in Hawaii, was not originally interested in a career as a chef. Married to a serviceman in the Navy, she moved with her husband and two kids across the United States, to wherever he was stationed. Pollack had been enjoying being a homemaker, and the family moved to Chesapeake in 2018.
After her diabetic mother in Hawaii lost a leg due to infection, Pollack wanted to find a job in order to provide financial assistance. When a friend said there was an opening in the kitchen at ForKids, Pollack was initially hesitant but decided to go for it. As it turns out, “It was the dream job [she] never knew [she] wanted.”
Food was always something that kept Pollack engaged with her community while frequently moving across the country.
“Food kept me connected to my parents and culture, and it was something I could do to make people happy,” she said.
When she began cooking meals at ForKids, she discovered a particularly deep passion for her community that she hadn’t realized before. The shelter serves as a transition place for families and children, where social workers help find more permanent homes for them.
With a culinary team of four, Pollack and her colleagues strive to ensure a broad range of meals to show kids that healthy, nutritious food can come in many forms. The head chef, a retired Navy officer, went to culinary school after finishing his military service and emphasizes a diverse cuisine from different cultures. His favorite dishes to cook for the kids are soul food and Puerto Rican food. Another chef, who is of Thai descent, cooks many Thai dishes for the kids.
“We get a lot of potential donors who visit the shelter, so we will have to occasionally cook ‘upscale’ food too,” Pollack said.
Soon after starting at the shelter in 2022, Pollack noticed that many kids tend to dislike eating vegetables. Specifically, she noticed that kids really avoided anything the color green.
She said to herself, “I get it, you don’t like broccoli, but not even a green apple?” This encouraged her to try to incentivize eating fruits and vegetables of all different colors to kids.
Pollack and her team chose the name Color Your Plate for this initiative. The program is seven days long, with a new color from the rainbow each day represented by a fruit or vegetable of the same color.
Participating kids must take one bite of the fruit or vegetable without any dressings or sauces on it, chew, and swallow to be considered complete for each color. For each completion, they get a sticker, and any kids who completed all seven days can claim a prize or request a special treat, like making crepes with a donated crepe maker, as a reward.
“The kids loved it,” Pollack said. “It was very fun to see the kids encourage each other by saying, ‘It’s just one bite!’ to one another.”
Pollack tries her best to source produce that’s seasonal, and she tries to pick unusual or different things to keep the kids guessing. For example, for the color violet, she chose purple cauliflower, something that many kids might not have seen before. After the kids tried a bite, she worked with them to turn the cauliflower into a pizza crust, and they loved it.
Another example was when she made radish chips for the color red.
“Some kids thought it tasted like nothing, while others thought it was bitter,” said Pollack. “But the point is that they ate it.”
Pollack initially won a grant from Walmart to get the Color Your Plate program up and running. She and her team also won a Norfolk Southern Grant from Hampton Roads Community Foundation to further expand the program, and Pollack decided she wanted to source the produce more sustainably and locally.
“I love the idea of supporting local farmers and businesses,” she said. “We knew that adding an educational component would help get the kids excited and help them understand that food is fuel.”
She reached out to Chesapeake-based Warren Farms through Facebook and asked if owner Woody Warren would be willing to provide some of his farm’s produce for the program. Warren happily agreed, and plans to expand the program to bring the kids out to the farm so they can see the source of their food are underway.
“His father passed away recently, and it was his father’s wish for him to keep the farmland. He is trying to foster the same feeling of love and awe he had as a kid on the farm to other kids,” said Pollack.
By connecting kids to farmers so they can see who grows their food, Pollack hopes to build an appreciation for food that some kids may not have and lead them to be more open to trying new foods.
“I always share a vegetable pun and a joke along with unusual fun facts and health benefits,” said Pollack, who hopes to give kids a lasting desire to try new things.
Down the road, Pollack hopes to be able to consistently offer the program at regular intervals. So far, she has run the week-long program four times, twice in the larger community at outreach events. Approximately 100 children have participated in the program, and she hopes that number will grow.
She wants to expand the program to other kids as well, possibly in public schools or even juvenile centers, where some of her colleagues at the nonprofit are working to provide nutritional education.
Pollack knows how important it is to start introducing kids to the practice of trying new foods, and how it can lay the foundation for a healthy lifestyle when they grow up into adults.
“There’s a disconnect with all these farmers who have all this amazing produce that goes to waste, because it’s not being eaten quickly enough,” said Pollack. By asking farmers to supply their produce to these kids, Pollack hopes to reduce food waste while promoting a diverse diet in the younger generation.
She and her team are also beginning to offer cooking classes for adults, so that parents of these children can be included in expanding the family diet and encouraging healthy eating habits.
Now that Pollack’s own kids are older, and her husband’s military service will soon finish, she hopes that their stay in Chesapeake will be a more permanent one, where she can develop strong community resources for some of its most vulnerable residents. While she certainly never saw herself in this role, she feels grateful for the opportunity to work with others in her community to address food security, homelessness, and nutritional education.
Liza Thuy Nguyen serves as the 2023 American Farmland Trust Agriculture Communications Intern at AGDAILY, with a focus on helping to amplify diversity and minority voices in agriculture. Liza is originally from Anaheim, California, and attended the University of California, Davis, as a first-generation college student. She received a bachelor’s degree in genetics and genomics and went on to earn a master’s in horticulture from Penn State.
