Cedar Schiewetz and Ainsley March from the Vermont Garden Network recently came to teach students about nutrition and food. They educated everybody while also giving them a chance to taste some vegetarian chili that they made.

The students who attended the meeting got to learn much about the human body’s nutritional needs, and they got to learn some interesting facts about gardening and cooking. The students also got the chance to taste chili that the speaker made.

Cedar Schiewetz shared their wealth of knowledge on nutrition and digestion. They talked about the nature of germs and unexpected places you can find them. “Consistently, spice containers have the most germs on them,” Schiewetz said. People touch spice containers with dirty hands all the time, but nobody thinks to clean them.

“I found it interesting how your body handles and distributes nutrients,” Sophomore Jayda Perry said. 

Sophomore Andrew Lee said the most interesting thing he learned about was “whenever we take a deep breath of air, we inhale thousands of bacteria.” Though Schiewetz also said that it’s fine we inhale so much bacteria, because humans are really good at fighting off the bad bacteria.

Schiewetz also talked a lot about nutrition, and how it actually works in humans. They said, “coincidentally, humans have evolved to be really bad at digesting food. Human stomach lining can process the following nutrients: sugar… end of list.” It turns out, in the long intestine, humans actually have a whole ecosystem of bacteria that process the nutrients in the food for them. This bacteria is actually really important, because humans need the nutrients that these bacteria provide them.

The presenters also shared a lot about gardening techniques. They specifically talked about the Three Sisters technique. “It can improve the amount of vegetables you get by 20-30%,” they said, adding, “which doesn’t seem like a lot, but say you’re planting 300 vegetables… then it becomes a lot.”

“Eat across the color spectrum,” Schiewtz said. Eating various foods of multiple natural pigments is an important part of a healthy diet. The different plant colors are often linked to specific health benefits and nutrients. 

 The chilli they made was a great example of this, as it contained: butternut squash, quinoa, canned tomatoes, onions, potatoes and beans.

“I liked the flavor, but I didn’t like the quinoa, and I think the vegetables should’ve been cooked longer,” said Sophomore Frank Eugair.

At the end, students were offered two seed packets of their choice, so they could begin to grow their own vegetables and live a more nutritional life.

“I picked catnip and snap peas because my cats love catnip and I wanted to try something new with the snap peas,” Sophomore Jasmine McFadden said.