I am from an era where most kids had a close tie to farming or at least someone they would visit at times. Today that is far from the case. Now I don’t think it’s particularly necessary to know how to raise a chicken and collect eggs. Those would be skills you simply won’t ever use – in Yorkton, the city even rejected a request to allow for regulated backyard laying hens based on concerns from the Protective Services Commission.
That’s why you might at least want to know where eggs come from and how farmers make sure we have safe eggs to eat. If the issue of hens is within the purview of ‘protective services,’ there would seem to be a lack of understanding about the birds. A rogue hen wandering down a residential street is hardly a public threat, and if the concern was attracting foxes and coyotes, then the city might ban cats as well, and restaurant garbage had better be policed.
Understanding where our food comes from is important. A larger question is should youth learn how to grow food? My grandparents would likely do the proverbial rolling over in their graves to think people wouldn’t know how to grow a garden. They had green thumbs that extended up to their elbows, and in Tisdale, Sask., back then the majority of homes would have had a garden.
Today we make much of our food security, but often prefer a yard covered in concrete and gazebos so as to not need to sweat in the garden growing carrots. It’s understandable from the sense we trust the system to have food on the shelves whenever we go.
The COVID pandemic and now whatever is conspiring to make lettuce and other food items so expensive are showing us shortages can occur in our world, and lettuce grown hundreds of miles away may not always be affordable. Maybe our front yards should be a potato patch, and city boulevards should grow corn for community food banks, but that seems like an unlikely scenario anytime soon.
So does teaching kids how to garden matter? Probably not, since the opportunities to use the skill are limited, and an internet search is great for finding ‘how-to’ videos. That said, maybe youth do learn something intrinsic about food by getting their hands dirty in growing their future lunch.
What is more intriguing is the launch of Agriculture in the Classroom Saskatchewan’s new educational resource to help prepare students for life outside the classroom. “The Food Security Budget Game helps students explore the obstacles preventing food security and learn the skills of budgeting and cost-effective food choices. Based on the latest data from Statistics Canada, 5.8 million Canadians, including 1.4 million children, lived in food insecure households in 2021,” noted a release.
“The Food Security Budget Game helps high school students develop important life skills,” says Sara Shymko, Executive Director of AITC-SK. “Students learn that many families are only a paycheck or unexpected expense away from food insecurity. It is imperative that students understand the barriers and challenges of food security, and why budgeting is so important to financial stability.”
These are skills that are critical – understanding that, while soft drinks might be cheaper than milk, it’s not a good choice, and how to be careful in purchases because money is always more limited than we might like.
- Calvin Daniels
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Disclaimer: opinions expressed are those of the writer.
