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Food skills development on campus : a UBC Food Systems project

University of British Columbia. Sustainability Office

To meet the food security and health needs of the UBC Campus Community, our team of LFS 450 students researched into the development of food skills on campus in conjunction with the UBC Food Systems Project’s goals towards campus food system sustainability. Our primary objectives were to discover what food skills development related resources were being offered to campus residents at present and to examine what food skills related programming, infrastructure, and resources were desired by campus resource representatives. Through an initial literature review, we formed a working definition of food skills into three components: food knowledge, food practices, and food perception & conceptualization. With these pillars of food skills in mind, our team conducted semistructured interviews with various campus resources related to food or food skill programming. These campus resources included (but were not limited to) student clubs, student residences, the UBC Farm, AMS Food Services, and many more. In our research analysis, we searched for general trends common to the campus resources we interviewed and came up with the following interpretations: campus resources differed in their perception of food skills, most campus resources were heavily student and volunteer based, there was a lack of communication between campus resources, and a general lack of kitchen infrastructure, space, or human resources for more effective programming. For our recommendations, we suggest creating a common hub to connect all campus resources together whether physically or online, hire a main coordinator to organize the common hub for consistency of programming, implement effective advertising to promote campus resources to campus residents, and implement food skills development workshops into LFS 100 as a pilot project in explicitly promoting food skills development for first year students. For future LFS 450 research teams, we recommend looking into gathering more information on non-student campus resources pertaining to food skills or community engagement and also conducting focus group interviews with the UBC student demographic to confirm which food skills are lacking in the UBC student population. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”

Text

University of British Columbia. LFS 450; UBC Social Ecological Economic Development Studies (SEEDS) Student Report

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0108835

Land and Food Systems, Faculty of

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/