Most food travels 1,500 miles before it lands on a dinner plate, and that separation between meal and man is a big reason why Antonia Demas says kids aren’t eating right.

Demas, a food educator with a Cornell PhD, gave parents and kids a one-hour lesson on healthy eating Monday at the Wigwam Complex.

The hands-on presentation introduced the audience to Demas’ Food is Elementary program, which she has taught around the country and hopes to bring to Anderson elementary schools.

With a focus on fresh whole foods, Food is Elementary gives students a chance to taste exotic meals and learn basic nutrition.

Demas demonstrated how she instills the basics of vitamins by encouraging students to eat a variety of fruits and grains based on colors.

Vitamins A and C, for example, are found in fruits that are yellow, orange, red, purple or green. Brown foods, like grains and nuts, as well as green foods, are good sources of vitamins B and E.

The one left, vitamin D, comes from the sun. So a colorful meal eaten outdoors covers all the bases, Demas said.

She let kids show what they’d learned by handing them a rainbow of raw fruits and asking them to use their imaginations to create a colorful fruit tart full of vitamins.

Food is “something so basic that we now have to teach it,” Demas said. The evidence is in the growing number of health issues appearing in overweight children, she said.

And Anderson is seeing the problem.

More than a third of tested kindergartners last year were either already obese or at risk of becoming obese, according to Susan Landess, executive director of Indiana Healthy Choices, a group that teaches healthy eating habits.

Landess has been working with the Madison County Minority Health Coalition for the past 15 months instructing adult community groups on wise nutritional choices, and she’s hoping to begin a similar program in Anderson schools based on Demas’ approach.

Landess compared the growing childhood obesity problem to parents allowing their children to drown and doing nothing to stop it.

“Our children are dying,” she said, “just slowly.”

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