Kirsha Kaechele to discuss growing good health outcomes at Cancer Council event

Kirsha Kaechele will talk about her aim to ‘completely transform healthcare’ in Tasmania at a Cancer Council lunch on Friday.

• Sowing the seeds of success
• Mona to partly reopen for six week ‘experiment’

THE lives of whole communities are being transformed by a project aimed at completely transforming healthcare outcomes in Tasmania.

Kirsha Kaechele — artist, curator, and wife of Mona owner David Walsh — will be the guest speaker at the Cancer Council’s Unite in Yellow Lunch, where she will be talking about the 24 Carrot Gardens Project and the transformative power of art.

“The idea is to completely change health outcomes in Tasmania,” she said.

“When you watch how quickly a child learns, you see how amazingly achievable it is to change how an entire generation eats just by introducing them to fresh produce and giving them the power to own their diets and to express themselves creatively through food.”

Kirsha to talk about her 24 carrot garden and other projects at a Cancer Council fundraising lunch. Picture: RICHARD JUPE

Ms Kaechele said in some of the state’s low socioeconomic communities there was a “disturbing lack of knowledge” around fresh food, with some children unable to identify common fruits and vegetables.

Some children have never used utensils or eaten at a dinner table.

“24 Carrot is a way of dissolving the wealth gap. You really do see a correlation between low socioeconomic neighbourhoods, where the level of obesity and diabetes just shoots up,” she said.

A vegetable garden at Mona is now expected to be a permanent fixture after Ms Kaechele ripped up the lawns to create hers in March — produce from the garden is being provided to a cooking competition at Gagebrook, and will suppliment the veggies grown at other 24 Carrot gardens.

However, the future of her current garden is uncertain.

“I’ll have to negotiate with my husband. Whether it stays in the middle of the lawns we’ll see,” she said.

The Unite in Yellow Lunch will take place at Crowne Plaza on September 18. Tickets are sold out.

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