Camco library to take food literacy on the road

Gingersnap cookies with flaxseed. Sweet potato pancakes. Creamy broccoli soup — without the cream. Asparagus guacamole. Black bean brownies.

Those are some of the healthy recipes Stacey Antine, a registered dietitian and founder of Health Barn USA, likely will bring to South Jersey families as part of the Camden County Library System's new mobile food literacy center, launching next month.

With the help of a $59,000 grant from the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development, the county will use the mobile culinary center to educate residents about the food they eat.

Health Barn USA, a Bergen County-based organization that offers nutritional education and workshops, is one of the first partners to sign on. Camden County Library spokesman Mark Amorosi said more will follow, including local chefs, food banks and retailers.

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The program will target Camden, Amorosi said, as well as the county's other communities, to bring residents more resources for healthy eating, like a mobile kitchen, workshops on budgeting and meal planning, and English as a Second Language classes centered on international cuisine.

"This is very exciting," said Antine, who founded Health Barn 11 years ago, frustrated with the emphasis on treating, rather than preventing, childhood obesity. "(Library officials) reached out to us when they applied for the grant — and these grants aren't easy to get."

Antine said her mission is to give parents the tools to help them teach children healthy eating without what she calls "the lockdown" — no snacks or sweets at all, which can make kids resentful, angry or prone to binges.

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Instead, Health Barn educators try to offer alternatives to sugars, unhealthy fats and overly processed ingredients.

"Brownies were my favorite dessert as a kid," she said. "And people will say, 'But it's a brownie will all organic ingredients' — yes, but it's still a brownie."

Incorporating black beans into the recipe adds nutritional value. Asked if kids might balk at such an unusual ingredient in a favorite treat, she laughed: "Actually, that sort of works for kids. They like that little weirdness."

Health Barn, she said, will gear its program toward Camden's diverse population, adding Hispanic-themed foods with lower carbs, sugars and fats. The mobile food literacy center will partner with them and others to offer cooking demonstrations, books about nutrition and healthy eating, iPads with nutrition-related apps and information, cookbooks, workshops and more.

According to a 2015 report by the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, about 40 percent of Camden's 77,000-plus residents live below the poverty line.

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In addition, the report said: "The city is home to only one full-service grocery store but has approximately 123 corner stores. Few to no farmers’ markets operate in Camden during the summer growing season. The city’s lack of grocery stores, high percentage of people living in poverty, and high percentage of people without access to a car led the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to designate Camden a 'food desert' in 2010. Healthy food access — whether due to financial, physical, or social constraints — remains a concern for many Camden residents in 2015."

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“People can become literate in many different ways," said Linda Devlin, the county library director. "Food is both a universal language and a universal need that we can use to advance literacy skills across cultures. The versatility of the mobile kitchen will allow us to reach many parts of the county through our branches and off-site through our partners."

Antine, author of the book Appetite for Life, hopes Health Barn and other partners in the mobile food literacy program can help change that.

"We want the parents to be the facilitator (for better eating)," she said. But kids have the ultimate say: "They'll give us a thumbs-up if they like it and a thumbs-down if they don't, but most of them go with the thumbs-up.

"Then they can't believe they just devoured a brownie with black beans in it."

Phaedra Trethan: (856) 486-2417; ptrethan@gannettnj.com