Veggie Girl brings fun to the dinner table

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This article was published 31/03/2015 (4078 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s a new superhero in town and she has an incredible power — she gets kids to eat their vegetables.

Alicia Coelho, 26, is also affectionately known as Veggie Girl in the community. The University of Manitoba human nutritional sciences student has been working with the Fort Garry-St. Norbert Healthy Child Coalition for the past six months, leading family-friendly cooking demonstrations teaching parents how to prepare a “vegetable of the month” — and all while wearing a superhero’s cape and a chef’s hat.

Veggie Girl was the brainchild of Robyn Chase, initiative co-ordinator with the Fort Garry-St. Norbert Healthy Child Coalition, and public health dietitian Rosemary Szabadka.

“They thought I could be a vegetable superhero, so it would be fun for the kids,” Coelho said over the phone from her home in B.C. “I think for the kids it was really good.”

Coelho teamed up with the Coalition as part of a university practicum and was partnered with Szabadka as her supervisor. After the first appearance of Veggie Girl, the title stuck and followed Coelho throughout her six months of sessions.

“We stopped calling her Alicia, poor her,” Chase said with a laugh. “It was a neat thing for parents and they really enjoyed it. I got some great comments back.”

The Fort Garry-St. Norbert Healthy Child Coalition offers free drop-in sessions at local family centres to support parents and families in the areas of nutrition and physical health, literacy, and capacity building. The Veggie Girl program was funded in part by the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority’s Healthy Together Now grant, allowing families to take home the vegetables they learned about and try the recipes at home.

Stevy Golden, a Fort Garry resident, and her 16-month-old son Landen participate in much of the programming the Fort Garry-St. Norbert Healthy Child Coalition offers. According to Golden, the family nutrition sessions, including the Veggie Girl programs, are invaluable.

A first-time single mom, Golden says she was worried about introducing meats to her son’s diet and had limited experience cooking and preparing food. Through the programming she’s gained the confidence to cook new and healthy meals at home.

“It’s incredible; they just saved me,” Golden said, “And Veggie Girl is new, and she brought a whole bunch of new recipes, and we made cauliflower pizza crust last night.”

“It’s opened up my surroundings around me, especially as a parent I’m learning new things and I like being active in the community and meeting other moms.”

Although the Veggie Girl sessions have come to a close and Coelho has finished up her last year of studies at the U of M and moved back to B.C., she hopes the Veggie Girl program will be able to continue in some form.

“I think it would be really good if someone could keep carrying on with what I did,” Coelho said. “I think that would be really helpful to get more variety of vegetables because Canadians generally don’t eat nearly enough.”

For more information on the Fort Garry-St. Norbert Healthy Child Coalition, go to ftgarrystnorberthcc.ca