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| Photo credit: Judy Baxter (Creative Commons) |
I thought so too.
As it turns out, the task was far from easy. I started by opening the PowerPoint program. I titled the first page “Where our food comes from.” I was rolling along pretty well, huh? Then it hit me. I couldn’t create this presentation.
It wasn’t the fact that I didn’t know where food comes
myself, or that I didn’t know how to tell kids where food comes from. It was the fact that I didn’t know what these
kids knew. I had no idea what kind of
knowledge base children have about where their food comes from. And if I remember correctly, I got pretty
upset when, as a sixth grader, all these adults came in telling me stuff that I
had already learned in the third grade.
The gears in my brain started to turn. I didn’t want to be the adult who upset these
kids. Who will hear this
presentation? Will it be pupils in urban
schools? Or in rural ones? Will it be kids with a rural background,
going to an urban school? Or will it be
kids with an urban background attending a rural school? What have their parents and teachers already
taught them? How do I address these
different audiences? Who IS my audience
at this point?
So I did what any logical PhD student would do at this
point. I researched it! And I researched it… And I researched it… And I found two documents describing
children’s knowledge of where their food comes from. TWO.
Both documents were surveys done in countries other than the United
States. I searched the USDA, the FDA,
the US Department of Education, and found no documentation that I could use to
help me understand how much children in our country learn about food
production.
This was very disappointing to me. We have consumers raging about wanting to
know where their food comes from, but we don’t even teach it in schools. We’ve got people spending hundreds of dollars
more in grocery bills just to have natural and organic products, and they don’t
even know the difference between naturally and conventionally-produced
food. And we have people throwing fits
about GMOs when they have no clue that their dog is technically a GMO.
As an industry, have to change these things. And not just within the beef industry. All agricultural industries will have to be
involved.
We have to teach people how food is produced, so they aren’t
afraid of it. The adult population has
been so inundated with misinformation from television, the internet, and other
media sources that many will not change their ways. Children, however, still have open minds
about the world. They are sponges. They take in all the information they are
given, and then use it in the future.
We must provide the correct information for them to utilize
in their futures. We must open their
eyes to the fact that food does not just come from the grocery store. We must
teach them how their food is grown, processed, and packaged so that they are
confident in not only the product they buy, but the way it came to them. And we must teach ourselves how to do this.
Our jobs are changing.
We do not just feed people in a hungry world anymore. We inform the world about how we are feeding those people.
It will start with understanding what to teach and who to
teach it to. Then we will need to devise
a strategy as to how to teach it to them.
I propose that we start with children.
We teach them how their food is grown, and even how to grow food
themselves.
My 10-year-old nephew lives in a city of 65,000. He hunts, he fishes, and he’s coming to my
family’s farm to spend a summer learning how to drive a tractor, feed cows, and
haul hay (among many other things). He
is so excited about it! He’ll go back
and tell his friends, and they’ll be excited about it! Children get excited about things! They learn, they do, and they are happy doing
it! We need to use this enthusiasm to
help them learn, and to get them involved.
That is our calling as educators, mentors, parents, and contributing
members of society—we can make a
difference, and we need to make it now!Cheers,
Tiffany Lee
