Where Food Education Meets Food Systems Change

all right alex thank you so much for this collaboration i'm so glad you're here yeah thank you for

having me and on behalf of our entire team at pilot light thank you to your you and your team we've been thrilled and thank you to all of you for being here

thank you um i want to start in with like what i think is a very hard question and and why do you think so many students are still not receiving food education in schools around the country

Well, that is a great question.

I think because, you know, a lot of times people think, you know, you have to teach them separately.

You can't teach food and math at the same time.

And you don't have to teach them separately.

Food can be a vehicle to teach math.

And we see that all the time.

You'll hear from some incredible educators later on.

But just to give an example of what that looks like, we've had recently a teacher in upstate New York teach about grain-fed beef versus regular beef and have students write persuasive essays comparing them and calculate the percentages of students and what they preferred.

And so those are lessons in literacy, in math, in food systems.

And so you can imagine how engaging that is for students and their eyes are lighting up.

And that's the magic of teaching through food.

It's just this incredible teaching tool.

And once teachers see that in their classrooms, they're excited by it and they want to keep doing it.

Yeah, it's like the perfect vehicle for teaching almost everything, right? Yeah.

I wonder if you can talk about some of the climate solutions that are being taught in classrooms through food.

Sure.

Well, you talked earlier about food education and what it is.

And that's something early on at Pilot Light we faced this challenge of kind of this perception that food education is nutrition education.

And we're here at Climate Week, and we saw it being something much broader.

We were founded in 2010, and we wanted to create a definition of food education.

We knew that that was something that we couldn't do alone, so we convened experts from all different disciplines in food and education, and we came together and we said to them, what are the knowledge and skills that students pre-K through 12 need to have informed relationships with food? And over two days, we landed on seven big ideas.

And those ideas are food connects us to each other, food has sources and origins, food and our environment are connected, food and our bodies are connected, what influences our food choices, what influences our decisions, and how we can advocate and create change in our food systems.