Food and Farming Education Lesson Plan Training Series: A Detailed Explanation of the Importance of Food and Farming Education

What is wrong with today's eating habits, and how is this closely tied to the food and farming education everyone is promoting today? First, the globalization of food brings with it the problem of food security. The definition of food security set out at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, Italy, is that any person at any time can physically and economically obtain sufficient, safe and nutritious food. One very important point is that it must cater to dietary habits and food preferences. What does it mean to cater to dietary habits and food preferences? Suppose a famine occurred today in a Muslim region, and we said, Taiwan has plenty of pork, would you like some pork as a gift? We say Indigenous peoples eat millet, but if millet cannot be grown, is it all right to eat rice instead? So beyond eating enough and eating safely, there is also the food culture within each ethnic group, and we should respect that food culture and meet their requirements and preferences. The problem with the globalization of food is that it fails to take into account that the world has so many ethnic groups with so many dietary preferences. We call the right of every ethnic group to choose the food it likes and the food it culturally prefers, together with the right to obtain sufficient nutrition, food sovereignty, which some also translate as grain sovereignty.

Our domestic food self-sufficiency rate is low. The situation in the country is that we largely depend on imports; even sugar depends on imports from Vietnam. Taiwan is a land suited to growing sugar, yet today we do not grow sugar, and long-term reliance on imports has led to an imbalanced food self-sufficiency rate. Nowadays many things are no longer grown in Taiwan, and we use foreign rice because it is cheaper. If one day other countries stop exporting to us, how will we sustain our daily diet? We should now do a good job of adjusting production in response to our current diet.

The endless food safety problems we face today are all inseparable from our food. For example, most people feel nothing about the issue of developing farmland, because it has no direct bearing on them. This is why we need to promote food and farming education: when these farmlands become building land, it creates problems for our daily diet. All of us today live in such an era; walk into a supermarket and you can see a dazzling array of food, and so we lack a sense of crisis about food shortages and food scarcity. Teacher Zhang Weiqi said that someone once told him: "To children, food seems to come from an alien planet." Let us not let our next generation lack a sense of crisis about food shortages and food scarcity.

The Mutually Supportive Relationship Between Green Eating and Food and Farming Education

In recent years, metabolic syndrome among adolescents has been increasing day by day. According to research statistics, the foods college students most often choose when eating out are, first, instant noodles, second, salt-and-pepper chicken, and third, braised snacks. Over these 25 years, the 4.5-fold growth in Taiwanese people's spending on eating out and the proportion of cancer cases show a directly proportional phenomenon. These two things reflect the problems of imbalanced diet and food safety. Before talking about food and farming education, we must first understand what green eating is. The aspects green eating focuses on: first, our traditional food culture must be passed down; second, the physical and mental health of citizens; third, environmental conservation; fourth, social welfare; and finally, beyond assistance for the disadvantaged, animal conservation and water resources, we can use green eating to promote interaction between families and communities. Green eating is not about promoting eating health foods or organic foods, but about supporting sustainable, ecological, environmentally friendly, socially beneficial, and local food culture production and eating consumption practices. The promotion of green eating needs to be built up through food and farming education, helping everyone understand the preciousness of "farming" from "eating," and building correct dietary knowledge from "farming." Professor Dong Shirui's definition of food and farming education: "Aimed at children, students and consumers, educational and inspirational activities related to agriculture and agricultural products jointly planned and cooperated on by those in agriculture and those in education; its content includes agricultural experiential learning inside and outside school, dietary education, etc., with the purpose of enhancing understanding of food and farming." Therefore we must bring children to the places where food is produced, let them understand how food is produced, so that the knowledge they construct will be more solid, rather than just being empty talk.

The Importance of Food and Farming Education

Food education includes two items. One is cooking for oneself and eating together; schools can combine this with environmental education, with content covering the passing down of local food culture, dietary ethics, and cherishing things. The other is the edible landscape aspect, covering the environmental ethics of food production, energy saving and carbon reduction, food sovereignty, and environmental justice. The two extended can achieve certain character education, with food and farming education at the core of character development and environmental care.

How do we practice food and farming education? The target is not only elementary schools; we should start from the family, the community, and daily life. What can families do? Families can start with energy saving and water saving in the kitchen, kitchen waste and resource recycling, green tableware, and using seasonal ingredients with low food miles. Green tableware means reusable tableware and cups. 99% of Taiwan's disposable chopsticks are made in China. At every stage of making disposable chopsticks, each stage assumes the previous stage has already sterilized the chopsticks. This is the problem with industrialization. Why does industrialization cause problems? Because no stage knows what the previous stage is doing. We should use reusable tableware as much as possible to be friendly to our environment, build a green eating culture through the family, reduce food waste, establish the ability to recognize the original flavors and tastes of natural foods, strengthen parent-child relationships through family members eating together and making food by hand, and pass down local recipes.

At the community level, green eating public facilities can be set up, such as setting up a food and farming education experiential learning farm or a community garden. Through green eating public facilities, local production and local consumption can be formed, which can serve as a response to climate change. Climate change and abnormal weather have reduced food crop yields in many countries around the world, and Taiwan relies on imports. If one day the whole country faces food shortages and no longer exports to Taiwan, how will we sustain our daily diet? All of us need to jointly support agriculture that is friendly to Taiwan's land and support local green farmers' markets.