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Spanish-language urban agriculture class combats Latino health disparities

She was one of more than 260 people who enrolled in an urban agriculture course offered in Spanish by MU Extension.

By Madison McVan Missouri Information Corps
Columbia Tribune
Aug 10, 2020

Excerpt:

Plants are at the center of Edda Berti’s childhood memories.

She spent weekends at her grandfather’s farm in rural Peru learning how to cultivate crops. Together, with dirty hands, they would take trimmings from young fruit trees and splice them into one another. Berti and the other children in her family would take off their shoes and squash grapes in wine barrels.

At her childhood home in Huaral on the outskirts of Lima, Berti’s mother grew onions, peppers, chilis and other vegetables in a big yard outside of the kitchen and used them in her cooking.

Berti grew up, studied in Brazil, then immigrated to the U.S. and settled in St. Louis. She lost touch with her nature-filled childhood.

But when her mother died in 2018, she felt the plants pull her back.

“Home for me is food, is plants, because she was gardening,” Berti said. “So to come back to that moment of losing her, and grab a little bit of her, was to reconstruct all these things that for me was balance and home.”

Berti started gardening — a lot. She’s now on the board of Fit and Food Connection, a health and wellness nonprofit in St. Louis. She has a garden in her backyard and a plot at a local community garden, where she grows vegetables to donate.

Berti remembered a lot of what her grandfather taught her about plant cultivation, but she wanted to learn more — and she wasn’t alone.

Read the complete article here.