Food educators are key to helping children learn to love fruits and vegetables and build lifelong healthy habits. The unique and successful FRESHFARM FoodPrints experiential food education program is a model for effective food and nutrition education – and how we should be training people in this field – with two decades of experience building positive relationships with nutritious food to help sustain minds, bodies, and the world around us.
Comprehensive food education creates excitement and interest in cooking and eating fruits and vegetables; knowledge, skills, and empowerment to lead healthy lives; and understanding the impact our food choices have on personal health and the health of our planet.
In the FoodPrints experiential food education model, students:
Grow and harvest fruits and vegetables to learn where food comes from
Cook nutritious and delicious recipes to gain culinary skills
Eat the recipes they prepare, with opportunities to try many new foods
Learn content tied to academic areas to support classroom learning
FRESHFARM has been recruiting, training, supporting, and providing hands-on experience for future food educators for a decade. In the past three years, our service learning program has grown to encompass training across the food system. Research shows that the majority of our service learners in our program said that the experience increased their interest in incorporating food or nutrition into studies or career paths.
