Connecting children and youth with healthy food systems

Across Ontario people are doing great work to connect children and youth with good food!

The Ontario Edible Education Network has been established to bring these groups together to:

  • Share resources, ideas, and experience
  • Work together on advocacy, and
  • Make it easier for people across Ontario to support children and youth in eating, growing, cooking, celebrating, and learning about healthy, local and sustainably produced food.

Learn more about the Network.

Check out some stories about the spaces, places and ideas that are changing what kids eat.

 

Photo Credit: Children get ready to dig in The Stop CFC’s teaching gardens.

 

School Food Map

Sustain Ontario, in partnership with Farm to Cafeteria Canada and the Coalition for Healthy School Food, has been working to map school food activity. Whether you’re a school with a school food program or involved in food literacy activities, or a community partner connecting with school food programs, please get yourself on the map! This will help others learn about your activities, and help us keep in touch with you about what’s happening in Ontario.

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Resources of interest

  • For useful resources relating to kids and good food, explore the Sustain Ontario Greenhouse
    (To search food related lessons plans linked to the Ontario curriculum click on the “Food Literacy” initiative and then select “hands on”)
  • Check out our Food is Science website, which supports educators to teach the new food literacy expectations embedded in Ontario’s Science and Technology curriculum.
  • Explore Granting Programs on the Farm to Cafeteria Canada website
  • Access our Past Newsletters
  • Check out Policy Position Papers including submissions to government consultations
  • Learn more about the Impacts of school food and food literacy programs

Learn about our National Partners and access resources on their sites:

Farm to Cafeteria Canada (F2CC) is a pan-Canadian organization whose vision is “Food systems that nourish people and the planet.” F2CC works with partners across Canada, including Sustain Ontario, to transform how food is experienced, learned and celebrated in all schools across Canada.

  • Sustain Ontario has partnered with F2CC to advance farm to school in Ontario through the Farm to School: Canada Digs In! project, which has included shared communications, support and training for the F2S salad bar grantees in Ontario, and support for the implementation and evaluation of F2S activity in the province, as well as the Nourishing Indigenous Foods and Foodways in Schools initiative, which is working to support Indigenous school communities to have more capacity to harvest, preserve, grow, and serve more Indigenous food and other nourishing food to children and youth, and to engage students in Indigenous foodways and gaining food skills.
  • Check out exciting stories from Ontario’s Farm to School Salad Bar Grantees.

The Coalition for Healthy School Food is a network of over 300 organizations from across Canada advocating for a national school food program. The Coalition has been the driving force behind advocating for an investment by the federal government in a cost-shared Universal Healthy School Food Program that will enable all students in Canada to have access to healthy meals at school every day.

To Get Involved or to Learn More about the Ontario Edible Education Network:

Related News on the Sustain Ontario Blog
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