Lessons in Food: Food System Literacy for Children
How we eat shapes us, our communities and the world. But more often than not, building an understanding of how food is produced, how diet impacts health, how marketing influences choices and how the complex global system that feeds us all function is learned haphazardly or accidentally, if at all. Taught at an early age, those lessons can shape a lifetime of food choices, of health and of career opportunities. But there is no requirement that Massachusetts students graduate with any knowledge of the food system. There should be.
This is not a new concept. For decades, home economics was a part of school curricula. In those classes, students learned how to cook, how to shop and even how to grow crops and raise livestock. But as the fast-food industry grew, prepared and processed foods became readily available in supermarkets, the population became more urbanized and disconnected from agriculture and schools faced pressures to “teach to the test” to prepare students for careers rather than life skills, home economics and the valuable skills that came with it was squeezed out of the school schedule. That loss, in turn, has shaped the food system, diets and public health.
But in an era of smartphones and food delivery services, students can still be inspired by planting seeds and watching them grow. They can learn about life cycles by watching chicks emerge from eggs and can come to understand how sugar and salt trick their brains into desiring certain foods. They can explore a huge range of career options, learn core skills like math and writing through applied lessons and can build understanding of their communities and how they interact with the wider world. An array of efforts around Massachusetts have creatively and innovatively brought these lessons to classrooms, cafeterias and school gardens, enriching students’ learning experiences.
Boston Public Schools, for example, has 64 school gardens and is hiring an outdoor teaching and learning manager to coordinate the district’s gardens and help teachers integrate these facilities into their lessons. In Fall River, the Diman Regional Voc-Tech school has an aquaponics system where students raise tilapia and learn about the fish life cycle as well as about how to prepare them for meals. Hawlemont Regional Elementary School in Charlemont has a farm on school grounds, where students care for animals, grow vegetables and integrate those projects into lessons on everything from math to the environment. In Lowell High School’s culinary arts program students learn skills that help prepare them for careers in food service. Many more examples of school gardens, cooking classes and other related programs are scattered across the state, most able to point to impacts ranging from healthier eating to broader interest in and awareness of the role food plays in all of our lives.
But for every student who graduates having benefited from these lessons, there are far more who do not. The successful programs across the state have occurred, in most cases, because of an individual teacher or administrator who championed these teachings and put in extra hours, raised money for equipment and went above and beyond their required curriculum to integrate these lessons. The result is a patchwork of efforts that serves students unevenly.
These essential lessons should not just be for the children lucky enough to have an inspired teacher. They should be fully integrated into classroom education statewide, supported by adequate funding and aimed at educating students about how to best care for themselves nutritionally, about how their food choices relate to their communities and the world beyond them and about the range of career opportunities that exist in the food system.
Food education integrates well with existing curricula, from science lessons about biology and climate, to applied math related to cooking and agriculture, to teachings about history, civics and social justice that examine the inequities of the food system, where those inequities came from and how to dismantle them. Food connects well to cultural learning, helping students build identities and understand those of others. It lends itself well to hands-on learning where students of nearly any age can not only master many tasks, but see a full complex process through to completion and even eat the results! It can prepare them for careers ranging from farming to food scientist to entrepreneur and many others (one in 10 jobs in Massachusetts is directly related to the food system). And it can have both an immediate and long-term impact not just on the health of the students themselves, but on the health of their families as well, since children are so often the drivers of what households eat.
Enhanced food system literacy has extended benefits as well. Students who come to appreciate fresh food and understand the value of supporting local growers will seek out Massachusetts-grown produce, meat and dairy products, helping to sustain the agricultural economy. In turn, those farmers will be better able to care for the natural resources they steward, helping address some of the impacts of climate change. Others may apply their learnings to advocacy, helping to shape policy that supports a healthy food system.
Leadership for implementing food system literacy programming that serves all students fully and equitably must come from the State. Food system literacy elements should be integrated into the State education frameworks for math, science, social studies and other relevant subjects. Agencies should coordinate efforts, with the departments of education, public health, agriculture and others collaborating on program development, goal setting and support for educators. Schools should be incentivized to add robust nutrition education goals to their wellness policies, and should be supported in achieving them. Teachers should be supported with funding, professional development and staff that provide coordination among subjects and between schools. All of these efforts should include long-term outcome monitoring, to track how these lessons impact students’ lives.
Lessons learned at a young age often have the greatest impact over an individual’s lifespan, and habits developed early on are those most likely to stick. By investing in teaching food system literacy to Massachusetts children, the State can help improve public health while giving kids an opportunity to learn about the world through something that is both personal and universal, and that is enormously effective at demonstrating the connections between so many essential issues and topics. Those lessons will serve students in ways that will have a lasting impact on their lives, on our food system and on all of our communities.
The Massachusetts Food System Collaborative has published a report by Brittany Peats exploring these issues in greater depth, offering dozens of examples of food literacy work being done around the state, and proposing policy interventions. Available at www.mafoodsystem.org.
