“People eat food. They don’t eat nutrients.”
This is how Ruth Stemler of Denver-based Operation Frontline defines her particular point of view when it comes to battling hunger.
Rather than delivering prepared food to hungry folks, Stemler is focused on helping low-income families navigate the daunting, real-world task of feeding a family, healthfully and on the extreme cheap.
“The courses teach families nutrition, cooking, food budgeting, shopping and physical activity skills,” says Stemler, a veteran nutrition educator who joined Operation Frontline as director in 2005.
The organization is growing quickly. “The number of courses we taught and families we reached in 2007 increased by 51 percent over 2006,” Stemler says.
The agency has applied for funding from this year’s Post-News Season to Share campaign.
At one recent class in Commerce City, nine young mothers enrolled in Tri-County Health Department’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children start the morning with a Jeopardy-style nutrition trivia contest, battling over pointed questions about vitamins, fiber and protein. Tri-County is one of many area agencies that collaborate with Operation Frontline.
“This important vitamin can be found in dark, leafy greens,” nutrition educator Andrea Seely (a.k.a. Alex Trebek for the day) prompts. “Team 2?”
“Vitamin A?” answers Team 2, for 200 points.
It’s a clever way to impart valuable knowledge.
“Many of our students were shocked at the sugar content in a pop,” Seely says. “And the amount of fat in tamales.”
Trivia contest decided, the students file into the small kitchen. Today’s cooking lesson? Holiday side dishes such as wild rice, lemon-roasted green beans, and muffin-tin pumpkin cakes, recipes developed by Johnson & Wales alum Lindsay Kinateder, who’s on hand to demonstrate.
“I love working in a fancy kitchen,” Kinateder says. “But you wonder what you’re giving back. Here, you feel like you’re making a difference.”
Kinateder soon has the students chopping, stirring and mixing, while sharing tips on dicing onions and sneaking healthful ingredients into a skeptical family’s diet.
It’s a challenge participant Aracelia Hernandez of Commerce City, expecting her fourth child, counts as “not easy.”
But thanks to the program, she says, “I’m using less oil at home. And we’re not going to McDonald’s as much.”
Operation Frontline Colorado
Address: 2727 Bryant St., Suite 300, Denver
In operation since: 1994
Number served last year: 5,500 families
Staff: 4
Yearly budget: $335,000
Percentage of funds directly to clients/services: 83 percent
Post-News Season to Share, a fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, gave $1.79 million to 62 agencies last year serving children, the hungry, the homeless and those in need of medical care. Donations are matched at 50 cents for each dollar; 100 percent goes directly to the agencies. To make a donation, see the coupon in today’s paper, call 888-683-4483 or go to .
