One day, there was no tree. The following day, a fully grown strawberry tree sat in the middle of the 1-acre student farm at Food Literacy Center in Sacramento. It took about eight men with a flatbed truck and a Bobcat to get the donated tree on-site and planted.

For the students at the elementary school next door, the seemingly spontaneous sprouting of a large tree overnight was a sight to behold, says the center’s founder and CEO Amber Stott.

“‘Oh my gosh, how’d you get that tree so big?’” Stott recalled students asking with curiosity. The tree is one of the many marvels children find at the farm, a place where they also explore, run around, grow food and search for ladybugs.

“They’re so proud. On Back-to-School Night, we’ll have the doors open and they’ll be like, ‘Mom, I gotta show you this [and] take their parents on tours out here,” Stott said. “They definitely get their wiggles out here. Also a lot of them will tell us they feel very calm. A lot of them will take their little journals and walk around and just sit somewhere.”

Food Literacy Center is celebrating its 15th anniversary, with one of its biggest accomplishments coming in the last few years. In 2021, the nonprofit moved into a new, state-of-the art 4,500-square-foot facility next to Leataata Floyd Elementary School and across the street from the historic Marina Vista public housing in the Upper Land Park neighborhood.

The $4.3 million facility, paid for by Sacramento City Unified School District, includes a cooking classroom, commercial prep kitchen, student farm and offices. FLC teaches children about healthy cooking, nutrition and gardening.

The center is an example of “how to do government right,” Stott said. The facility is the result of a partnership between her nonprofit, SCUSD, which owns the land and facility, and the City of Sacramento.

Nutrition education programs such as FLC may become even more critical as recent cuts by the federal government to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) show the vulnerability of the country’s food safety net. Additionally, inflation has driven up the cost of healthy foods, like fruits and vegetables, and about 20% of U.S. youth between the ages of 2 to 17 are obese.

“We’re trying to get [students] to have access to food, but we want it to be healthy food, and so we have to help change their behaviors so they like healthy food and will eat it,” Stott said. “Our program combines those solutions.”

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