Joyoung Hope Kitchen's Food Education Program: Students Learn Nutrition While Playing

News provided by

Jul 06, 2015, 07:05 ET

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.

volunteer Jiang Zhaojin instructing students on how to create assorted cold fruit and vegetable dishes

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."

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150703/227986

SOURCE Joyoung Company Limited