The Garden is a Positive Food Environment

Preschool children in rural areas eat more fruits and vegetables when the produce is homegrown.

"It was a simple, clear finding," said Debra Haire-Joshu, Ph.D., director of Saint Louis University's Obesity Prevention Center and a study author. "Whether a food is homegrown makes a difference. Garden produce creates what we call a 'positive food environment.'"

Researchers interviewed about 1,600 parents of preschool-aged children who live in rural southeast Missouri. They found that preschool children who were almost always served homegrown fruits and vegetables were more than twice as likely to eat five servings a day than those who rarely or never ate homegrown produce.

The American Dietetic Association recommends between five and 13 servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

In addition, children who grow up eating fresh-from-the-garden produce also prefer the taste of fruits and vegetables to other foods, the parents told researchers

Other ways to put this:

Parents who grow vegetables are more likely to serve home-grown vegetables to their kids than parents who don't garden and so don't have home-grown vegetables.
Parents who have a strong desire to feed more vegetables to their kids are more likely to find creative ways to get more vegetables in their kids than other parents.
Kids who grow up eating a particular type of food like it. Or kids who eat fresh produce will prefer fresh produce (just as kids who grow up eating food from cans generally prefer food from cans)

Parents who care enough about produce to go to the work of gardening and growing it themselves feed the stuff they've grown to their kids. Lots of it.

Parents who garden to save money on the grocery bill will feed the garden produce to their kids instead of throwing it away and buying groceries.

Look, I get it. Gardening is good for kids, and vegetable gardening is good for their diets. I agree. But If this article is an accurate report of the researcher's conclusions, then it's rather silly.