Heidi Kyser

Flip to the All Things department in the most recent issue of  Desert Companion, KNPR’s arts and culture magazine, for my story about Create a Change.

Lately, I’ve run into several Las Vegas nonprofits that, like Create a Change, are  geared toward teaching people how to grow their own food. They include Growing Great, the Tonopah Community Garden and Project Angel Faces. A distinguishing feature of Create a Change is the celebrity chefs, who visit participating schools during harvest time to teach kids how to use the fruits, vegetables and herbs they grow in recipes they can cook themselves.

During our interview, Executive Director Tiffany Twohig told me that celebrity chefs are to some kids today what celebrity athletes were (and still are) to most kids when I was one. Bring up Gordon Ramsay, she said, and you’ll get the “Oooo”s and “Ahhh”s that, in my childhood, were reserved for the likes of Michael Jordan. Tiffany and her mom and Create a Change co-founder Candace Maddin hope chefs’ pop icon status will help seer in kids’ minds the organization’s overarching message that the best food you can get is the kind that travels the shortest possible distance between a plant and your plate.

I’m starting to get the feeling that the edible garden trend is more than a phase, but it will be interesting to see how those who advocate gardening to solve problems such as poverty-related malnutrition and childhood obesity will reconcile their goals with the growing need for water conservation in the Las Vegas Valley.

Of course, if we eradicated lawns, the point would be moot, but that’s for a later post. For now, let the gardens grow, and we’ll see if kids start to figure out that carrots actually don’t come from carrot factories.