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Making schoolchildren food-literate is charity's goal
Oct. 29, 2005. 01:00 AM
Having successfully introduced one idea to Toronto schools — that given a choice, most students will eat healthy, fresh food — the charity FoodShare Toronto is putting the finishing touches to its next idea: that students are ready to learn a lot more about food.
But why should they want to? "Because," says Debbie Field, FoodShare's executive director, "people can't survive well in our society if they don't know what to cook and how to cook."
She calls the proposal Field To Table Schools, and says it would provide "food literacy and agricultural awareness."
As the Star's Jennifer Bains reported two weeks ago, FoodShare's salad bars are already operating in 17 of the city's elementary schools.
And, despite all the naysayers who claimed kids couldn't be wooed away from junk food, they are flocking to eat fresh, raw vegetables, fruit, whole grain bread and — where a school offers it — more adventurous choices such as Moroccan red bean dip, vegetarian chili and roasted root vegetables.
The secret of success has been what FoodShare calls the "offer-versus-serve principle." Students are given a wide range of choices in the salad bars and are allowed to make their own decisions on what to eat, and how much. It may seem simpler and faster to serve them, says a FoodShare manual, but it's the opportunity to choose that wins students over.
The Field To Table Schools program will build on the salad bars to explore how foods get to be nutritious.
It will bus students to farms to see how food is produced. It will twin schools with individual farms, develop school-based community gardens, establish composting centres, and invite farmers into schools to talk about farming.
Students will learn about cooking and how food quality relates to soil fertility, pest management, seasonal changes, processing for market and transportation.
The program, says Susan Butler, FoodShare's front-line facilitator, will encourage schools to become "environmentally friendly, ecological centres ... (that will foster) an integrated and holistic approach to food." FoodShare has just received a $38,000 grant from the Laidlaw Foundation to establish a pilot project for the program next spring in three schools.
As I see it, the program has the potential to do much more than its immediate objectives. It can lay a groundwork of understanding that in later years will help students grapple with big issues such as the legitimacy of subsidies that distort markets and impoverish farmers in developing countries, the addition to global warming caused by transporting food thousands of kilometres instead of growing it locally, and the impact of artificial preservatives on human health.
Field has no reservations about artificial preservatives: "My mom always said that if bugs (bacteria) don't want to eat something, we don't want it in the house."
Dead food is what she calls processed food containing artificial preservatives. "We live in a dead-food system that's based on adding enough chemicals to food that it can last forever and become a commodity.
"Kids need to be eating food that's fresh and alive," she says. "The greatest danger facing them in Canada is obesity." Processed foods without any roughage and junk foods are major causes, she says. So, "making schools a site of healthy, fresh food should be seen as a public health necessity."
She's a powerful presence, and she makes a powerful case for the program.
