The Manager of the Bruce D. Campbell Farm and Food Discovery Centre says information provided during the centre’s school tours has become much more focused on what the students are learning about food through the media.
The University of Manitoba’s Bruce D. Campbell Farm and Food Discovery Centre was created to help tell the story of how food moves from the farm to our plates.
Centre Manager Myrna Grahn says, over the years, the approach to sharing that message has changed.
It started off more as just a tour of the centre and learning about the different exhibits where as now we’ll do hands on classroom programs with them. We’ll do lots of communication regarding hot agriculture topics like GMOs or antibiotics or hormones in their foods or pesticides and we’ll have really great conversations on those topics. We’ve also incorporated more baking into the program so that they learn how to manipulate ingredients, weight out the different flour, grind the flour and then make breads.
We’ve had to adapt just because technology changes and because kids know a lot about their food and we really want to add some nutrition parts as well as dealing with the media. In the media, on the internet, they learn lot’s of misconceptions about how food is produced. We even get into processing so we’ll talk about dairy processing. When we do the egg program we’ll talk about what happens in the different processing plants between the farm to their kitchen table and we also like to share about the nutritional choices that they can make between making foods themselves or buying highly processed foods.
We really address some critical thinking so that they are considering what they are hearing in the media, what they are hearing in commercials and can really think about, is this really what’s happening from what I’ve learned at school or learned when they come to the centre.
~ Myrna Grahn, University of Manitoba
For more information on the Bruce D. Campbell Farm and Food Discovery Centre visit FFDC.Ca.
