Monthly Archives: November 2013

Post 10 (Final post): Blog summary and Group project presentation!

Posted on by
Reply

This will be our final blog post! Can’t believe we made 9 post like this for keeping track of our group project. This is the first time we made a progress blog like this one, and it has definitely been a educational experience for us. We realized that keeping a blog going is a lot of work, and it can be frustrating at times to keep up with the course required contents. For some weeks, our group had lots to write about, but for other we were simply waiting on community partner’s reply to proceed with our project. Because our project is more of a research based project, we lacked media contents of ourselves for our blog. We tried to make use of past Special Olympic games images to fill this gap. A suggestion for future LFS students: Try to keep track of your project with images to have more media content for the blog (ex. take image at every meeting/event). This was something we definitely could have done for our blog. The quality of our blog reflect our lack of experience, we hope that future LFS 350 students can use our blog as a template to build their blogs to be much better!

For the final week of LFS 350, our group did our group project presentation in front of our community partner and class peers. Our group prepared all week for our group project presentation. Everyone had a maximum of 2-3minutes to speak to keep our presentation under the time limit. Workload for this presentation was evenly divided. Personally, I felt good about the presentation, everyone did their part, and our practice for the presentation kept us under the time limit. During the question period of our presentation, Seb answered most of the questions. I heard from other members after the presentation that they wanted to help answer the questions as well, but they lacked confidence in front of the class. Overall, our presentation went very well, some concerns was brought up during the question period on our project result. We will take their advices into consideration for our final report.

Thank you for reading our final blog! For future LFS 350 students reading this blog, we hope for the best of luck with your project! Cheers!

post 9: Final report task distribution

Posted on by
Reply

Welcome back to our post!

This week was our last week before our short presentation in front of our class. After 2 month of continuous struggle with project planning and on-going modifications, we have a clear picture of what we want to accomplish for this project, now we just need to divide the task among our group members. We decide to divide task individually instead of meeting and working as a group. This is mainly because of our class schedules time conflicts which made it difficult for us to meet together for the project. It would be nice for us to have more time to work on the project together during some of our lecture times. For us to make use of lecture time for the project will definitely be easier to organize group meetings, and our time spend will be much more efficient. After a brief meeting this Tuesday to divided our task, everyone accomplished their work, and we were able to share our part though Google-doc and facebook. Everything is going well, personally I am excited for the presentations next week to see what everyone else accomplished for their project.

One of the task we hope to accomplish this week was visit a dietitian and get some advice from them to help us with our project. Shi Yuan presenting our group did the interview. Here is a rough overview of the event from her:

We met up with a dietician Dr. Nooshin Alizadeh-Pasdar, PhD, RD on Friday, Nov.22. We wanted to ask for some suggestions and feedback from her on nutritional aspects for our guidelines. She gave as some recommendations:

1. Affordability. GMO free and organic foods are about at least 30% more expensive than conventional foods. Can food services/athletes really afford to buy them?

2. Some GMO free/ organic foods from California are relatively cheaper than those produced in Vancouver. Is locally produced really necessary?

3. Drinks are not necessarily sugar-free. Low sugar is fine. Athletes need extra calories. (Salt as well).

4. Grain–whole grain is better.

5. Eggs– omega-3 fortified eggs are better.

Disappointingly, since she didn’t have any research experience in sport events/big public events, she didn’t give us many recommendations on big scale events. However, she reminded us that foods affordability and FOOD SAFETY are important for a big public event.

Information from Dr. Nooshin is helpful for us. We’ll adjust our guideline accordingly. Thanks Nooshin!

Post 8: Project is on its way!

Posted on by
Reply

We apologies there hasn’t been a lot content on this blog lately! Everyone has been busy with the midterms, presentation, and etc. But rest assure! Our project is coming along nicely!

On November 5, our group representatives, Seb and Weber, met again with our community partner from UBC food service. Our SEEDS project coordinator was also there, and she showed us a food procurement project done by LFS students from 4 years ago. It was a well done project by our predecessors. Their food procurement guideline is concise, organized, and educational. Although some of the information is out of dated, we can definitely learn from its structure and apply our knowledge to it and forge a modern version food procurement guideline for the Canadian Summer Olympic Games.

At the meeting, two key concerns for the guideline was brought up by the UBC food service community partner. First concern is the flexibility in the approval standard of our guideline. “Do we want set the standard so high that no one wish to apply? or do we want some flexibility with the guideline?” We decided that we shall be incorporate a point system for the food vender’s manual in order to address this concern. For every category of food, a rating of best, good, and avoid will be given to food in that category. 1 point for best, 0 point for good, and -1 point for avoid. Every food category used in the food manual need to have at least a positive score for it to be approved. This way, we are giving flexibility to the food venders, but also retaining high quality standard for the food manual at the event. Second concern is how we are rating these food standard. Since UBC is hosting this event, our community partner hope to achieve at least the food standard already in place on UBC campus, such as third party certification, free trade, ocean wide food standard, and etc. Our group project will definitely reflect their concern, and we will set the UBC food standard as the basis of our food procurement guideline for the 2014 Summer Canadian Olympic Games.

 

Post 7: Group Reading Presentation

Posted on by
Reply

On October 30th, we lead a class discussion revolving around Godfray’s article entitled “Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People.” The author identified a number of problems and potential solutions associated with providing food for an increasing and affluent population, while simultaneously mitigating inadequate access on a global scale. Generated discussions circulated around prioritizing problems with the current food system, with our impressions focused primarily on distribution practices and waste management systems.

Our experience with the CBEL program, as well as our interactions with fellow students have exposed us to the unequal distribution of resources in the Vancouver area. While our efforts have been tailored towards a relatively well-funded food procurement system, dedicated to incorporating a multitude of nutritious local produce, our peers have unveiled the paradoxical food insecurity prevalent in the lower-income demographic. The contradiction between social classes in Vancouver demonstrates a a small-scale model of Godfray’s key message, in which global disparity presents a double burden involving catering to the rich while providing for the poor.

Post 6: Reflecting on our project progress

Posted on by
Reply

After presenting our project proposal to our community partners at the meeting (You can view our project proposal here: https://blogs.ubc.ca/lfs350project09/?p=56), we also received constructive feedback from other members of the Canadian Olympic Game Organizers and the UBC Food Service representative via e-mail during the week of October 23. One of the key concerns was the scale of our project with our limited time. Our community partner felt that our proposal might be too broad with the limited time that is available to us for this project. They especially pointed out the food map we want to do for this project.

There will be another meeting with our community partner on November 5. Our goal for the next few weeks will be condensing our project proposal, making it more precise and feasible with our class schedule. With regard to our community partner’s concerns on food map in our project, our group decided we will be removing it from our project.  We were also told by our SEEDS program coordinator that there will be a sample food procurement project done by past LFS students available to us as a reference. Our group is really looking forward to this reference! It should be really helpful moving along our project.

Until next time, cheers!