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GREENSBORO — In this half-acre garden, surrounded by our city of concrete, you’ll find just about everything.

Tomatoes and eggplant. Sweet potatoes and squash. Cantaloupes and okra. And some leafy thing called stevia that you can slip between your cheek and gum and taste nature’s sweetness.

But this teaching garden at the Greensboro Children’s Museum is only the beginning. It’s going to put Greensboro on the farm-to-table map and give it a chance to become a first in something rather than a follower.

All with the help of a chef known as the “Michael Jordan of Edible Gardens.’’

That’s Alice Waters. She’s written eight cookbooks, runs one of the finest restaurants in the world and started a foundation that has created garden programs at middle schools in New Orleans, Santa Fe, N.M., and Berkeley, Calif., her hometown.

Now, there’s one in Greensboro. It’s the first in the Southeast, the first in a museum, and the first of its kind geared specifically for elementary school students to help teach them about math, science and nutrition.

Waters is an uncompromising crusader of healthy eating. She doesn’t own a microwave. She doesn’t go to the supermarket. Yet, she’s done more to change the way we eat and think about food than anyone since Julia Child.

And there she was, a few days ago in the half-acre garden at the corner of North Church and Lindsay streets.

She was the small woman in sunglasses. She was always hidden in a crowd, perched in the shade. But when she spoke, she sounded almost evangelical about what she calls her Edible Schoolyard.

She came on her own dime from California. And she doesn’t do that very often, if at all. She’s a woman who hob-knobs with first lady Michelle Obama and makes at least $35,000 for any speech she gives.

But she came to Greensboro to raise more money for the Edible Schoolyard. The project already has $750,000 pledged, and all that money will turn a half-acre in our city into a tiny farm. And that’s just the beginning.

Waters came because she believes. Every chance she got, particularly in front of a crowd, she became a poet of a working kitchen as she talked about the need to touch, smell, taste and see the food we eat — and grow.

The data is there. Growing your own helps with everything from problem-solving to critical thinking. But according to Waters, there’s also something else: We’re slaves of fast-food, shackled by bad nutrition.

And she says it’s killing us.

The statistics from the Center of Disease Control are scary: One out of every three kids eats fast food, obesity among children ages 2 to 5 has doubled and obesity among children ages 6 to 11 have tripled.

Meanwhile, the litany of diseases related to bad nutrition — diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, depression — only seems to grow.

But step into the museum’s Edible Schoolyard, near the two scarecrows made of burlap and wood, and listen for the roar of discovery.

Katrina Siladi heard it. Last summer, she ran the museum’s four Edible Schoolyard summer camps and watched kids weed, dig in the dirt, make pickles, sing songs and scrunch their face when they ate a tomato they just picked.

Or simply catch up with a kid. Like Tyonna Walker.

She’s 7, a second-grader at Sumner Elementary, a 565-student school in south Greensboro where 80 percent of its children are on free or reduced lunch.

Tyonna has never had a garden. But she’s always wanted one. She wanted one so bad that she gave her mom for Mother’s Day packets of flower and pumpkin seeds from Walmart.

And one morning last week, she found herself in the Edible Schoolyard. Digging.

“It looks so beautiful,’’ she said, as her mother stood nearby. “I like the scarecrows and the flowers, and we can learn who are they, these kind of plants, and how they grow so we can be smart.’’

Nearby was her second-grade classmate, Christopher Castro. He’s a fresh-food convert, too.

“It’s healthy,’’ he says. “And I can get stronger (if I eat it) so I can play soccer AND kickball.’’

Then, scoot to northwest Greensboro, to The Greensboro Montessori School, a K-8 private school where ecology and nutrition are incorporated into the curriculum and tuition can run more than $11,000 a year.

At this school in the middle of a big garden, where fig trees turn into forts, you’ll hear students say the very same thing.

Some have their own gardens. Matter of fact, fifth-grader Condie Cantrell has her own blog about her garden.

And some dream in green, like sixth-grader Dennis Quaintance. He’ll talk for five minutes about his idea of being a “green mechanic’’ who lives in an eco-friendly house made of mashed-up cardboard and plastic.

But sometimes, they dream big. Like sixth-grader Aubrey King.

“Humans all need food, and if they settle down and eat food together, that’ll lead to more relations and more relations and more relations,’’ he says. Then, we become more connected.

“You hear people today talk about world peace, and I believe the more connected you are with each other, the easier it is to reach that goal.’’

In our city, a spot of 100 languages, race and class often divide us. But in the northern corner of downtown, this half-acre garden intends to bring together all kinds of people bonded by the one thing they have in common: food.

Think of the possibilities. And think of where that can go.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com