Summer is coming to an end and the rain marks our return to school and the start of a new semester. But it’ll be an awesome one with tons great things ahead! Over the summer we worked with summer camp students on three workshops. Briefly, the topics we have covered are:

Food Security:

We explored food security and availability, where and what kinds of foods that we see at home or in our everyday lives, touched a bit on food system chains such as from the grocery stores from the farms, as well as discussed the role of import foods in our view of food security. As part of an activity, we brainstormed “Pillars of Food Security” where we made a list of three main components of being food secure (Availability, Access, Use). We also discussed food insecurity and how we can help those that are food insecure.

As a hands on work activity, the kids decorated an old yogurt container and then planted kale, while having kale chips as a snack! Yum!

Sustainability in Our Food Systems:

In this workshop we discussed how much food waste really occurs when food goes from farms to grocery stores to consumers. We discussed how food is wasted on our farms, such as crop failures, regulations on quality and appearance, and what we can do about this issue, namely using substandard foods as animal feed, being more careful as farmers and not overproduce crops, or sold at a lower price to encourage purchase. Grocery stores waste food and materials such as containers and packaging. The big thing to counterbalance this is to buy local, buy in bulk when possible, and be less picky about the quality of food when it doesn’t affect taste or nutrition. The last point leads us to consumer waste, where we as consumers throw out food or over purchasing and leaving food to expire or go bad. To help this issue, we can save our food as leftovers, not over purchase, share our food, and simplify what we buy.

To drive our point home, we made reusable grocery bags where the students could decorate their own and save on the use of plastic grocery bags.

How Food Gets From the Farm to the Table:

In our last workshop we looked at the process from food to our table of various types of food. For example, animals for meat products need to be fed, kept healthy by the farmer, properly slaughtered and processed, sent to butchers where consumers can purchase what they need. Vegetables need to have seeds planted, proper growing conditions met, harvested when ready, and transported to distribution centres and stores. Dairy and eggs have similar methods to meat products with the addition of the labour of collecting the milk or eggs, pasteurize, homogenized, and separated (in terms of milk). Further processing necessary for milk products (cheese or yogurt). We also talked about processed foods.

Later, we played a small game where we had the children guess which food originations from where!

And that briefly wraps up our summer workshops! We had a great time and excited that Food for Thought is starting to expand to more schools and teaching and changing the lives of more students! We can’t wait to start our regular schedule up again.

Follow