Katherina Arnhol welcomes " Time for Lunch" guests and speakers to the " Eat in" at Nancy Forrester's Secret Garden, Key West

11:30  Katrina Arnhold
Mana Project Exec. Dir. (Mana Project Environmental Educational Programs)

11:45 Nancy Forrester
Environmental Educator
(Nancy Forrester's Secret Garden)

1:30 Sherrill Rhoades (Host committee
Mana Project (501 (c)(3))

Volunteer Angela Byarlay, mother and artist, helps children draw and plant The Edible
Garden Patch.

A special thank you to Mary Spears Key West Musician who set up her amplified public address system in the morning for our noon speakers and played the guitar and sang for us from 2:00 to 5:00.

Community garden and organic produce advocates planted some of their first seeds on Monday, in the form of a message to local schools and the community, and they are hoping those seeds will turn into fertile plants with long- reaching roots.

The Mana Project and Help Yourself! healthy-food restaurant at Fleming and Margaret streets staged a Labor Day "Eat-In" at Nancy Forrester's Secret Garden in Key West, as a part of Slow Food USA's national "Time for Lunch" campaign.

The goal is to replace the over-processed food now served in many public schools with more healthy and organic foods, event organizers said.

Monday coincided with Slow Food USA's National Day of Action.

Congress has begun to set new nutrition standards for schools nationwide and Slow Food is hoping the standards will include serving healthier meals.

Monday's event showcased several different types of organically grown fruit and vegetables that were grown in the Florida Keys or South Florida, and sea salt and sponges that were harvested from local waters. The event also featured composting, including using coconut skins as mulch, as it's more dense and moist than other mulch, according local gardener Jeffrey Dickens. Organizers hope to make the event an annual one, they said.

"We were brought up with the philosophy that you eat to live, not live to eat," said event organizer Charlie Wilson, who owns Help Yourself!

"Somewhere we lost our taste for real food. We simply lost our connection with food -- how it is made, stored and what it does to our body. ... I urge everybody to do their own research. There is some disturbing information out there."

Wilson and others relayed stories and information about the health benefits of eating better and how healthy, organic food can be incorporated into local school lunches and into the curriculum.

Richard Tallmadge, owner of The Restaurant Store in Key West, has already begun to lobby Monroe County School Board members and school officials on creating gardens for students and adding more gardening and cooking into the curriculum.

Monroe County has already invested $2 million into culinary programs at each of the Keys high schools, Tallmadge said. Fruits and vegetables from a student garden behind May Sands school has been used for stocking the shelves at St. Mary's soup kitchen.

Tallmadge and other healthy food advocates want to see a community garden at each of the Keys elementary schools, as part of what they are calling an "Edible School Yard" program. The programs could be run in conjunction with math and science classes as well, he said. The school district in Berkeley, Cal if., has run a similar program there for 14 years and it's "wildly successful," Tallmadge said.

"It's a very big picture idea," Tallmadge said. "It will only come if parents demand more for their children, and citizens demand more from their community .... We can do this."

tohara@keysnews.com