Feeding the next generation

We have to start them young, as the saying goes. This is why, more than ever, we need to teach good habits to schoolchildren and the young in our own households. How do we change a whole generation to eat better and have healthier, more productive lives?

Start in school. In Korea, children are taught to eat good food at a young age. My niece, who is Korean, only gives her children freshly-cooked food and would not think about giving them fast food or instant noodles or TV dinners (for the Boomer generation, TV dinners were the hit in the 60s as you could microwave a complete meal to eat in front of what was the latest appliance then – a television or TV set, ergo TV dinner.)

They are also taught in Korea to pack up trash, clean up their garbage and throw their paper wastes in proper bins. At a young age, sorting waste is already part of the culture.

I have been wanting to put up Earth Gardens in public schools where children can learn how to grow vegetables. Today, you can at least bring your children to urban gardens such as the one in the center of Bonifacio Global City or the Sweet Spring farm of Kiko Pangilinan in Alfonso, Cavite. Kids must know what food looks like, how it is grown, for them to better appreciate its value.

Follow through at home. For continuity and consistency, we also practice what the school preaches by following the same good practices at home. We sort trash to recyclable, biodegradeable and not recyclable. We also serve good food and not convenience foods. The whole idea is to convert the present and future generations to what we were in the 60s. We bought milk in glass bottles, even if they were reused soda bottles with a cap made up of rolled banana leaves. For sanitation and health safety, we can now use glass bottles with better covers but still reusable.

Food literacy. We educate our young in school and we teach them by serving better food at home. Food and nutrition must be subjects taught in elementary school and parents will help with good practices at home. We teach them to eat more vegetables and fruits and be able to name fruits in season. If we bought every fruit in season, children will learn more about mangosteen and santol, aratiles and chico – more than Fuji apple and mandarin oranges, which are temperate and not tropical fruits. Children must learn about jackfruit or langka, guyabano or soursop, malunggay or moringa, mango, avocado and try them at least once a year, when they are in season.

Develop young leaders. We need to develop or discover new heroes or champions in food literacy and nutrition. Children starting school age must be taught how to choose better food. If we have champions they can copy or emulate, it would be easier to make kids eat vegetables, fruits and other nutrient-dense produce. But it has to be an NGO or government to start this, as commercial companies cannot advocate these while promoting their manufactured products.

Take them to nature farms. Children must see the fun and excitement in growing plants beyond the science experiments in school. We recently visited the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU) in Los Baños, Laguna where you can tour its perma culture farm or garden. You can see stingless bees, flowers, herbs and edible plants in a natural setting. The perma garden also teaches visitors how to reuse what otherwise would be thrown as garbage – paper food boxes, wooden forks, plastic bottles, discarded rubber tires, etc. They have an edible vegetable growing as a tree called lagikway, which could be the answer to food security in the very near future.

Start with your own plot of food. In the same division of UP, they have a plot measuring only two meters by two meters where you can grow food, embed clay water jars for slow irrigation, put a vine for sitaw and other crawling vegetables. It almost tells you that one has no reason to say I have nowhere to plant or grow my food. One plot we saw had various vegetables and it was small enough to be able to get water everyday even if tended by only one person, even a young child.

Talk about food with children. Where do chickens come from? What fish is better to eat? Why should we eat less red meat? What is organic pork? Most children these days do not even see real chickens or live fish. Though we see cows in books, they may not have seen a live carabao or goat yet. But to be able to do this, we must first also refresh our knowledge about where all our food comes from. Watch films on Netflix like You are what you eat, Food Inc., Kiss the Ground and many more documentaries about food and nutrition.

A friend told me that we now have lesser years living with medicine or maintenance medication than years without. That length of time is still getting shorter as we decide to eat less nutritious food. And he continues that children will contract non-communicable diseases (NCD) earlier in life because it is mostly food-related. Diabetes, chronic kidney disease and cancer – all of these are NCDs – are being diagnosed in the young. And that is sad, because health care costs will go up and we may have a sick generation sooner than later.

That is also expensive for public health programs. Imagine hiring an employee at 20 who is already on maintenance anti-hypertensive medications or undergoing dialysis. We do not want that.

So get to know food and how nutrient-dense your food is or is not. Remember what the father of medicine Hippocrates said: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”