Recipe for Change Initiative

What is Recipe for Change?
Recipe For Change is FoodShare's initiative to mobilize policy makers, students, educators and key decision makers to help actively integrate cooking, gardening, composting, nutrition and food literacy into provincial curriculum and school practice from JK to grade 12.

Video on our work in Schools

 

We want to improve the health of Ontario children by changing the grade 12 Ontario Secondary School Diploma (OSSD) to include food literacy so that all students learn how to make healthy food choices, access at least one healthy meal a day at school, and increase their physical activity through food activities such as gardening, cooking, and composting at school.

Why Recipe for Change?
How children eat when they're young lays the foundation for life-long patterns, but healthy food is not the norm in Ontario schools. Students are not regularly provided the tools to make healthy decisions to sustain themselves, nor are they taught how to garden, cook a healthy meal, compost or understand where their food comes from on an ongoing basis.

Childhood obesity and diabetes are global pandemics and, in Ontario, major health risks. Barring electives, and a few sporadic science lessons, healthy eating, hands-on food literacy skills and physical activity are not regularly integrated into the school day.

What does Recipe for Change Look Like?
Recipe for Change calls on supporters to enliven food literacy education in classrooms and school communities across Ontario through the delivery of hands on workshops, activities, events and more.

FoodShare has been busy working on developing resources, projects and events to launch the Recipe for Change message also included in the following "how-to" guides focusing on four key food literacy themes:

• Plants & Gardening
  
• Soil & Composting
  
• Cooking & Tasting
  
• Food: Outside the Box (for example, food and the environment, food and the media, food security…)

Recipe for Change links and resources

• To download our Eat-In Ontario "How To" guides, please click here >>
  
  
• For more information about Eat-In Ontario fall harvest celebration scheduled for Friday September 30th at Queen's Park, click here >>
  
  
• To download curriculum-linked food literacy resources for educators from our Eat-In Ontario event, click here >>
  
  
• For a list of Recipe for Change supporting organizations, local chefs, farmers, and educators, click here. >>
  
  
• To read more about The Great Big Crunch and to find out more about the over 112,000 synchronized 'crunchers' who participated in 2011, click here >>
  
  
• To review the photos from our vibrant Recipe for Change fundraiser in February 2010 and May 2011, click here >>
  
  
• To donate to Recipe for Change, click here.

For more information about the Recipe for Change initiative, please contact Meredith Hayes, Field to Table Schools Program Senior Manager: meredith@foodshare.net or 416.363.6441 ext 240.

 

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FoodShare is grateful for vital funding for our Recipe for Change initiative from