How serious is food waste? Children cry out through their drawings
A recent media report declared, "Taipei is the most wasteful: school lunches are thrown away to the tune of 1.9 billion a year!", pointing the finger at Taipei students for finding school lunches unpalatable and being picky eaters. The children of Class 1, Grade 6 at Wuxing Elementary School exclaimed in shock, "Are we really picky eaters?" and "Do we really waste that much food?"
To refute the claim that "Taipei students waste their school lunches," a group of children began discussing "What exactly is wrong with school lunches?" Through collecting sticky notes of the whole class's opinions in class, they discussed together and gathered information, and over summer break a few children holed up in the library to draw "The Picky-Eater School Lunch Strikes Back!" From the children's point of view, let's take a look at school lunches.
Hearing that the students were eagerly looking forward to a "green-roof mini garden," Yu Chun-hsien also said that the current "mini garden plan" is in fact very difficult to carry out thoroughly. Since school grounds in Taipei are all small, it is hard to really have a patch of open ground for the children to grow vegetables. At Wuxing Elementary School right now, they plant in the flower beds of the middle grades, "but this still doesn't feel the same as growing vegetables in farmland."
Yu Chun-hsien further admitted that he had previously heard children report, "Before the vegetables had even grown, we moved up to fifth grade, so the vegetables weren't ours to take care of anymore." In the end those vegetables, with no one to care for them over one summer vacation, and with the drip irrigation system malfunctioning during the summer break, "turned out that by the end of one summer vacation, all the vegetables had withered and died." It is very hard to let the children experience the feeling of "eating vegetables you grew yourself."
Moms Have Something to Say: Even the Children Know "We Need Food Education"
Parent Chang Jen-feng also said, "Even the children can see how important food and farming education is. We adults really need to reflect on this!" She further shared that she had once asked the children to make paper collages of the "vegetables of the future" in their minds, "and they ended up collaging a bunch of very unnatural vegetables full of a 'Star Wars' feel! It scared us moms!" Although they were very creative, she still worried that the children did not know what real ingredients actually look like.
"But after we helped the children get to know food, they gradually came to understand what food is really supposed to look like." Chang Jen-feng said, "After re-education, the vegetables they created came out much more normal!" This set of works, "The Past and Present Lives of Future Fruits and Vegetables," shows just how big the before-and-after difference in food education can be!
[Exhibition Information]
Little Citizens Don't OOXX - An Invitation from the Future. Contemporary Art Exhibition
Time: 2016/09/13-12/04
Location: Farglory Architecture and Culture Museum (4F, No. 97, Sec. 1, Xintai 5th Rd., Xizhi District, New Taipei City)