This week’s challenge: Increasing your Knowledge of Food and Nutrition
Most people know that eating too much fats, sugars and carbohydrates is unhealthy. Many also know bananas and mangoes come from far away countries. Some may be also be informed about the conditions of the peoples who grow or harvest the food they eat.
These days, we get many news and information from social media: in the age of “screens” and “fast”, we tend to trust what appears in our feed. We think we are well informed and many of us may be serious about food choices…why, then, are there so many fast-food businesses still thriving? Why so many buy stuff that has no resemblance to real food for their families? Why are obesity and type II diabetes increasing? Why do we keep buying “fresh” strawberries and tomatoes in January or why don’t we challenge having bananas and mangoes in Canada?
What you can do:
Eat seasonal and local: this ensures you eat real fresh food and reduces the burden in transportation and pollution caused by food travelling from far away places. It also ensures you support local farmers and producers, which increases resilience in your community.
Some ideas:
- Visit the farmers market closer to your community, look at food that is local and seasonal, and try choosing a vegetable or a fruit you have never or rarely tried before. Ask the vendors how do they suggest to eat it
- Visit the supermarket with your family and try to guess where each fruit and vegetable comes from: are they local? How many miles have they travelled? For how many days have them been packed? Do they have anything done or added so they look “fresh”? How does that affect your health? The flavour of the food?
- Do some research to learn where each component of your breakfast comes from, who produces it and how it affects peoples and the environment. How does it affect your health? Can you think of another food item you may use as a substitute?
- Learn what’s local and seasonal from these tables, and challenge yourself to buy local and seasonal food from trusted sources: http://www.bcfarmersmarket.org/fresh-market/whatsinseason
Become food literate by learning what’s healthy and what’s not and increasing your food choices and diversity.
Some ideas:
- Learn about the food groups and the variety of food in each one of them from the Canadian Food Guide
- Eat from the rainbow: when your plate has diverse colours from natural foods, you are ensuring that your body is receiving the nutrients (vitamins and minerals) that it needs.
- Challenge yourself and your household to eat more fibre in each meal, but do it slowly (one meal at a time, one week at a time, and drink lots of water!: do you know what fibre is and how it helps your body?
- Learn about servings (size or amount of food you need to eat depending on your age and sex): https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/food-nutrition/canada-food-guide/food-guide-basics/much-food-you-need-every-day.html
- Learn how to make wise choices about food: https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/food-nutrition/canada-food-guide/food-guide-basics/make-wise-choices.html
Increase the level of food literacy in your household and community: food literacy can save your life, increase your health and save you money! Food literacy also increases the resilience of your community and helps reduce poverty, hunger, malnutrition and social and environmental injustices that are related to where and how food is produced, distributed and consumed.
Some ideas:
- Request a Food Skills for Families workshop in your community or attend one: in these workshops, you will learn about food nutritional facts, how to plan and prepare healthy and delicious meals in a budget that are culturally appropriate, you will also learn many great recipes!
- Join or start a community kitchen to share with those less privileged such as seniors, single parents, the unemployed or homeless, people with disabilities or peoples from vulnerable or marginalized groups
- Organize potlucks in your neighbourhood, workplace or school and encourage people to bring food that is local and seasonal. Whole foods (preferable home made) with no or minimum packaging
- Create and share challenges among your family and friends; some ideas for challenges may include: increase the amount of water they drink in a day, walk more, increase fibre, try different foods, eat more local and seasonal foods, take a farms’ tour…or create your own!
- Organize food preservation parties in your neighbourhood or with family and friends and learn how to ferment, pickle and preserve by canning with reduced or no sugar: preservation allows you to avoid food waste and reduce costs by preserving what’s in season for when the season is gone
Reduce environmental and social injustices by consciously choosing to reduce pollution and waste.
Some ideas:
- Bring your own reusable bags, including mesh bags when buying at the farmers markets and grocery stores
- Ask your store if they accept you bring jars and reusable produce bags to avoid plastic
- Avoid buying food that comes in packages: packaging not only contaminates landfills and is difficult or almost impossible to recycle. Packaged foods tend to be sitting in a shelf for longer and many are processed foods
- Buy with a plan of what you will be doing with that food, to avoid food waste
- Learn to use left overs creatively and always save them in containers properly labelled with the date and the type of food
- Learn how to use food “scraps” to make fruit vinegar (with fruit peels and cores), broth (with vegetables and herbs and/or bones from baked birds), cakes and pound cakes with fruit and veggies pulp after juicing, etc.
Do you have your own ideas?
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