Heritage Magazine: Planting the Seeds of Healthy Eating

Heritage Magazine: Planting the Seeds of Healthy Eating

Any parent knows that getting a child to eat their fruits and vegetables can seem like a losing battle, but for participants in the Walker County Head Start Program, that struggle may soon be a thing of the past. Sam Houston State University’s Tabbetha Lopez and Linda Fergus are engaging in a unique partnership through two Academic Community Engagement (ACE) courses to provide meal kits, expose children to various vegetables and conduct wellness checks for the program’s parents and students.

Lopez serves as the director of the Graduate Program in Dietetics, including the dietetic internship program and an assistant professor within the Department of Human Sciences, while Fergus directs the department’s didactic program in food science and nutrition and leads courses of her own as an assistant professor. The two have worked closely in the past, often collaborating on projects where the dietetic interns provide nutritional direction to community members while the students conduct wellness exams.

“This year, we’re going to be helping out with the Head Start project, where we’ll be trying to get the children to eat more fruits and vegetables,” Fergus said. “We’ll have a few opportunities where they’re not just encountering the food on their plate, but being exposed to it, touching it, smelling it, doing activities with it, all to try and get them more familiar with it.”

Fergus and Lopez were inspired to engage in this partnership after their colleague Kathleen Gilbert, director of the SHSU Food Pantry, relayed community members’ struggles to incorporate vegetables like radishes into dishes. On top of not knowing how to cook them, the parents did not know how they could present the new vegetable to their child without noses being upturned.

To have food available to assemble meal kits, the collaborative effort is receiving support from the Powell Foundation as part of a $100,000 grant presented to the SHSU Food Pantry. The donation was made in 2024 in support of the shared mission between the SHSU Food Pantry and the Powell Foundation to fight food insecurity, improve health outcomes and promote health equity in the Greater Houston region.

“For eight weeks, we’ll be providing nutrition education for parents,” Lopez said. “Those that attend the education sessions will get to go home with a meal kit for their family’s dinner that night. It will have a recipe, and all the ingredients included. It’ll have all the fruits and vegetables that Linda’s students introduced to the children that week.”

The team’s mission is multi-layered. Through the nutrition education sessions, they aim to teach parents the importance of starting children on the right foot with healthy eating habits. They also aim to improve the health of the parents within the program, and by providing printed recipes complete with ingredient lists, they can learn to make a new meal and keep the instructions handy. Exposing the children to the fruits and vegetables in an environment that allows them to push the food around the plate will help them build positive experiences around the food.

All of this will be executed by the graduate and senior-level undergraduate students studying under Lopez and Fergus. Their participation adds yet another layer to the duo’s mission, encouraging students to engage with their community. For the Dietetic Interns, this serves as real-time training for their futures as registered dietitians.

“Depending on what path they choose, they’ll work with groups of people to help increase their healthy eating behaviors, and it takes a lot of skill to do that,” Lopez said. “You have to know nutrition education, but that’s also going to be kind of fluid when we get in there. Even though we’ve developed these lessons, they will have to answer questions, adjust on the fly and tailor the information to the population.”

Fergus expects to see similar learning experiences unfold for her students.

“They’ll practice their assessment and decision-making skills, and all of those things cross over to healthcare,” she said. “If they want to be a pediatric dietitian one day, if they just want to work in the hospital with adults one day, then they’ll be ahead of the game having experienced this.”

While this is their first partnership with Head Start of Walker County, the two have offered ACE courses before, and their current and former students serve as living proof that these collaborative endeavors enhance the learning experience. Natalee Acosta, a graduate student and dietetic intern, is one such student. Acosta began her academic journey at SHSU as a business major before getting into health and wellness during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As this passion grew, she changed her major to dietetics to pursue a career as a pediatric dietitian. Now, she is ready to get a taste of her future career through the partnership with Walker County Head Start.

“This program exposes young dietitians and dietetic interns to the different types of communities they may serve,” Acosta said. “More often than not, dietitians will work with someone who is grappling with financial and nutritional insecurities, so getting to practice and find ways to work around their situation and circumstances is great for aspiring dietitians.”

Acosta will be one of the students presenting children in the Head Start Program with fruits and vegetables to try, taking on the challenge of making them appealing to youngsters.  Together, they’re proving that community connections can plant the seeds of lasting change.

“This is our first Head Start collaboration, and I hope that we can expand this partnership beyond Walker County to some of the counties around us, because I think this is going to be great for the community and everyone participating,” she said.

For more inspiring stories about all things Sam Houston State University, read the Fall/Winter 2025 edition of Heritage Magazine here.