Tag Archives: LFS 350

Quest food exchange has been around for 23 years, serving the community with low-cost groceries for individuals that find it hard to make ends meet. Individuals who are on financial aid or welfare are eligible to receive memberships or vouchers for Quest purchases. They have 3 different locations in the lower mainland, two in Vancouver and one in Surrey. Quest food exchange’s main goal is to reduce waste and provide low-cost groceries at their markets and by delivering raw food materials to agencies for their own meal programs. Volunteering opportunities are available for individuals who wish to give back to the community and receiving low-cost food at the same time. For every 4 hours of volunteer work, volunteers receive a $13 voucher to spend at Quest markets. But training these individuals is costly and takes up a lot of time, especially when volunteers flake out. This is where group 7 comes in; they are creating a volunteer manual for Quest food exchange to cut down on training time and funding. This will be a take home manual, which will include all the instructions and tools required for volunteers who wish to work at Quest food exchange. Quest has requested that it be a simple and straightforward instruction manual because most volunteers are refugees that may or may not have the adequate language and/or computer skills.

-H

The food system is a frequently used term in dialogs and discussions about health, food, nutrition and the community. It includes all processes used to feed a population. This is what group 23 has done with the story of bread; using bread as the study case to demonstrate the infrastructure involved in the food system. Two workshops have been conducted at Tyee Elementary School for 6^th and 7^th grade students and a third will be facilitated within the next two weeks to complete this Think&Eat@School project. Students were introduced to the story of bread, grain production and how it’s farmed, harvested and made through 5 different activities. These activities included milling, nutrition fact tables and different grains. Part of group 23’s approach and methods of collecting qualitative feedback about these workshops is allocating time for students to create mind maps in groups. Group 23 reported that most students knew a lot more than expected about the food systems but a certain group of students had some feedback that was different from all other groups in the 6^th and 7^th grade at Tyee elementary school. When asked what food means to them, this group responded with names of fast food chains and other unhealthy food choices. It is interesting to see how some students group together, and perhaps report answers that may not be true to themselves due to the sense of belonging (i.e. peer pressure) to fit in with their group mates. Hopefully this will change by the end of the third workshop, where they will all participate in preparing bread with group 23. What type of bread will they be preparing? You’ll just have to stay tuned to find out.

-H