FARMINGTON – When University of Maine at Farmington students Alyce Cavanaugh and Jasmine Brooks surveyed local middle-schoolers one morning, they found that 78 percent of them hadn’t eaten breakfast.

The two community health education majors had planned on focusing their senior project on bringing health education into a local school, with an emphasis on teaching kids how to cook with local foods, Cavanaugh said Thursday.

With Maine’s obesity rate among 12- and 13-year-olds at 30 percent, they had expected to find unhealthy eating habits, and for the most part, that’s just what they found.

“We asked them general questions about what was their knowledge of the food pyramid,” Cavanaugh said. “I want to say maybe 70 percent of them didn’t know how many (fruits and veggies) they should eat.”

So she and Brooks created a health education curriculum for Weslene Marble’s Middle School science class, using both general nutrition science and information from the Western Mountains Alliance’s Eat Smart Eat Local program, which encourages people to buy locally grown food.

The result was a hands-on learning experience that got kids into the kitchen with their parents, cooking and creating healthy recipes using primarily locally-grown food. “It just snowballed, basically,” Cavanaugh said. “We wanted to make the learning fun.”

And they must have been successful, because not only did 15 students take part in a healthy cooking contest, non-participating students got excited about changing the way they eat, too.

“I knew we were making an impact,” Cavanaugh said. In one instance, a boy didn’t want to try the smoothies the class was making. Now he and his mom make them all the time. In another, a child told his mother how much fat was in a fast food meal she had just ordered. One boy called Cavanaugh over to his desk to see what was in his lunch bag recently, she said. He had begun substituting baked chips for fried ones, she said.

“They learned a lot,” Brooks said.

They learned about the food pyramid and about why it’s important to eat breakfast (it gives you energy and starts your metabolism running with a bang). They kept charts of what they were eating, learned how to make healthy choices at fast food restaurants, and learned proper food presentation techniques.

The fruits of their labors were on display Thursday afternoon, when four local people involved in the food industry congregated to judge the recipes in the healthy cooking contest on healthiness, apparent taste (from photos and recipes – the actual food wasn’t on display), use of local ingredients, and presentation.

“Some of them put a lot of time into it and some didn’t put so much,” said Judge Bucky Leighton, who works in food service at UMF. “It’s amazing what these kids can do,” he added.

A by-invitation potluck honoring the 7th- and 8th-graders will be held on Monday, during which awards will be given.