Healthy Food for Healthy ChildrenWhat We Can Learn from Plants by Silke Gebauer, Project Officer at Grffn.org

Schools Food Web pupils taste testing - "Can you taste the difference" pilot.

There’s a growing awareness that what we eat shapes our health — yet the conversation often begins too late, when food is already seen as Food as Medicine. Don’t get me wrong: Food as Medicine is a powerful movement, but I believe we need to go beyond that.

Food shouldn’t just help us heal; it should help us stay healthy in the first place. For that, we must look closely at what kind of food we’re giving our children — because healthy food means healthy children, and that starts with understanding food quality.

Fruits and Vegetables: More Than Nutrients

Fruits and vegetables are more than their nutrients. They are organisms that (should) come out of living, symbiotic systems — full of relationships between soil, seed, sunlight, and, as we become increasingly aware, care. When any of those elements are missing, something essential is lost, and our bodies can sense that.

For decades, science tried to define food by breaking it down into measurable components — calories, proteins, vitamins, and minerals. Useful, yes, but also limiting. It reduced the richness of food to a list of numbers, and from there to supplements, which we now know can never replace real, living food.

Food is more than its ingredients. It is a living system, and its quality — what it can give us — depends on the health of the plant itself.

What We Learned from Shropshire Schools

Together with the Shropshire Good Food Partnership, GRFFN recently ran a project in Shropshire schools to explore whether children can tell the difference between fruits and vegetables from different sources — such as organic and conventional produce from supermarkets, local growers, and farm shops — using our GRFFN methodology.

The hypothesis we were exploring is this: humans have an innate ability to detect healthy, nutrient-rich food that supports ecosystem health. And for the most part, that proved true during the school project. The children could tell when something tasted fresher, more vibrant, more alive.

But there was a surprising twist. In some cases, children preferred the blandness of supermarket carrots — simply because that was what they were used to. It made us pause. Are we training a generation to prefer less flavour, to accept lower quality as normal? If so, that’s not just a matter of taste. It’s a public health issue.

Learning from Plants

In my search for what truly makes food “healthy,” I spent time in Japan studying Shumei Natural Agriculture. This approach doesn’t rely on fertilisers, pesticides, or even the usual regenerative techniques — yet the results are remarkable.

I spoke to several people in Japan and read even more testimonials of individuals who had healed themselves from a range of illnesses and attributed that to food grown this way.

It made me realise that health begins not in the body, but in the life of the plant itself.

Real Food Makes Us Stronger

A healthy plant — one that has grown naturally, in symbiosis with its environment, fulfilling all its life functions including defence against pests and diseases as well as reproduction — tastes vibrant and complex. A plant fed artificially, on the other hand, often tastes bland or oddly one-dimensional — sometimes overly sweet and nothing else.

By contrast, plants raised with synthetic fertilisers may grow faster and taller and look perfect, but they are often full of water, less resilient, less vibrant, and less complex in their flavours.

In my comparisons, fruit from Shumei Natural Agriculture — like tomatoes or pomelo — were full of healthy seeds. Supermarket fruit, by contrast, often had few or none, meaning they couldn’t reproduce. If the plant itself isn’t healthy enough to carry on life, how healthy can it really be for us?

Healthy food strengthens us — even when we can’t yet measure exactly how. Unhealthy food, even if it looks fine or meets nutritional standards, can weaken us over time. It can dull our senses, trigger allergies, and contribute to chronic disease. We don’t want our children to grow up needing food as medicine. We want them to grow up on food that keeps them well from the start.

The Taste Test for Health

How can we tell if food is truly healthy? Sometimes it’s as simple as listening to our taste buds.

A healthy plant — one that has grown naturally, in symbiosis with its environment, fulfilling all its life functions including defence against pests and diseases as well as reproduction — tastes vibrant and complex. A plant fed artificially, on the other hand, often tastes bland or oddly one-dimensional, sometimes overly sweet and nothing else.

Our senses know the difference, even if our minds don’t yet have the language for it. That’s why taste education matters. When children learn to recognise the vitality in real food, they’re learning the foundation of lifelong health.

Join the Conversation

At GRFFN, we believe every child — and, in fact, every person on this planet — should have access to real food: food that nourishes the body and spirit while supporting ecosystem health. There is no other way: our well-being is inseparable from the health of the ecosystems that produce our food.

👉 We’d love to hear your experience with school meal provision.How healthy is the food in your school? Do children enjoy it? Can they taste the difference?

Your insights will help both GRFFN and the Shropshire Good Food Partnership work toward healthier, higher-quality food for all our children.

You can share your experience here or email emma@shropshiregoodfood.org.

Together, let’s raise a generation that knows — and expects — real food.

Silke Gebauer is a Project Officer at Grffn.org, a research organisation exploring the links between food quality, perception, and human wellbeing.