HANGZHOU, China, July 6, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- "I don't like
carrots. They taste strange." "I won't eat tomato. It doesn't taste
good." "I don't like steamed rice, as it doesn't have any taste at
all." Each child can utter the names of several fruits and
vegetables that they don't like when asked what they do not like to
eat. They'd rather have soft drinks and unhealthy snacks. This was
the scene at the class dedicated to food education taking place at
Hangzhou Changqiao Elementary School where volunteers from the
Joyoung Hope Kitchen project are introducing innovative assorted
cold food dishes to third graders.
A twelfth-grader, studying in the
United States, is volunteering at today's session, and, for
the Joyoung volunteer, it is proving to be an experience unlike any
other she has had since starting work with the Joyoung
organization. The 17-year-old Jiang Zhaojin said she was spending
her summer vacation back in her native country of China when she heard about the public welfare
project. She immediately asked if she could help. In the U.S., her
public service volunteering landed her stints as a school crossing
guard directing traffic and as a food packer for needy children,
but it's the first time that she has had the chance to communicate
with children face to face. She fully agrees that the Food
Education Program makes sense, can truly help the children eat more
healthily and make the general public more aware of the importance
of food education.
Joyoung Hope Kitchen has been trialing food education classes in
23 schools across 21 provinces and municipalities and the classes
are not only liked by the thousands of students, they appear to be
benefiting from them. In 2010, the China Youth Development
Foundation (CYDF) and Joyoung Co., Ltd. signed a donation agreement
establishing Joyoung Hope Foundation under the aegis of CYDF with
an objective of raising 50 million
RMB over a 10-year period to build Joyoung Hope Kitchens in
1,000 schools located in China's
disadvantaged rural areas. As of June
2015, approximately 250,000 students have been directly
benefiting from 523 Joyoung Hope Kitchens built in 21 provinces
with another 83 kitchens currently under construction.
During the process of implementing the Hope Kitchens, people
involved with the project discovered that most children have no
idea of what constitutes a healthy diet and saw a lot of children
with malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies caused by being too
picky to their eating habits and food preferences. Joyoung vice
president Han Run said "Joyoung Hope Kitchen's wish and mission is
to ensure a well-balanced and sufficient meal for all
children."
Food education in China has a
long way to go -- we are still very much at the preliminary
and exploratory stage. The National Development Guidelines simply
named "easy access to dietary nutrition and fitness knowledge" as
one of the main measures to improve the overall health of the
population while NGOs are looking at different models of food
education. With the aim of putting in place a model for food
education that would be effective in China and to let a growing number of children
benefit from it, Joyoung Hope Kitchen is pioneering the Food
Education program and progress is being made. During 2014, the
scope of the Joyoung Hope Kitchen project has been further expanded
from simply providing a sufficient amount of food to providing
well-balanced meals and becoming a main venue for food education.
The Joyoung Hope Kitchen passes on knowledge about nutrition to
students through lively and engaging activities such as
easy-to-execute experiments and fun games.
How to change a child's picky eating habits and make sure he or
she eats a balanced meal? This vexing issue is not a problem at all
in the Food Education class at Joyoung Hope Kitchen. The children
shout with glee when they see the rice symbolically turned into a
white rabbit. The children exclaim with excitement when they see
the carrot become a tiger. The vegetables and fruits are endowed
with new meanings after this "re-modelling".
The instructors say that the food education class is like
teaching a course on magic tricks; children are excited about the
class and look forward to each session. The kids say it is because
of the fun games and the experiments, so far from the traditional
teaching and learning processes that they are used to. The children
can play, learn and get to eat food, all at the same time. There
have been observable results: children who have taken such classes
have adjusted their eating habits for the better, and those who are
overweight have shed pounds and moved into the normal weight
range.
The children have become more imaginative and creative as they
become familiar with nutrition and build up a store of knowledge
about their personal health. Assorted cold dishes made of
vegetables and fruits arranged by the children come true to life.
Each creatively made food assortment embodies the children's new
values when they think of nutrition. Volunteer Jiang Zhaojin said
"The children in my group can certainly be naughty at times, but
they are willing to share food with each other. At the stage in the
course where we are now -- each student had to make a small speech
during which they offered the food assortment they had just made to
their classmates, they all made
sure to give each one of their classmates a chance to speak. I was
truly moved by the experience."
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SOURCE Joyoung Company Limited