Whenever I talk about food security and food choices in my mother tongue or national language, people have asked me “is food and nutrition a science or a cultural practice?”
Integrating nutrition into the curriculum would take the following into consideration:
Contents of teaching curricular be country or region-specific, in line with variations in climate, soils and ethno cultural food choices and practices. A country with varied climatic conditions will have a curricular content reflecting food advantages in the different climatic conditions, e.g. livestock products, marine foods, food crops, and the role of networks in the exchange of food items.
The curriculum to contain detailed information on all stages of the nutritional chain: food production, processing, storage, preparation, to consumption.
Where to delive content of the curriculum? The information could be sourced from extensive research on practices around food and nutrition - what is food to different communities and individuals at various life-stages, when and how people acquire food and nutritional habits, is it through socialization, formal institutions, extension workers? Then can we define an approach with the greatest impact in terms of behaviour change to embrace nutrition sensitive agriculture. The process is to help avoid situations where the curricular is miles apart from practice; practice of households where decisions on food are made.
To what extent will changes in curricular have an influence on agricultural practices, especially in rural Africa where agriculture is mostly small-scale and family oriented? I imagine that the integration of nutrition into the curriculum of higher training institutions would be more practical in societies with large-scale agricultural production, where the use of technological inputs demand reliance on college and university trained personnel. The approach more likely to succeed in rural Africa with family farms is incorporation of information on nutrition sensitive agriculture into curricular at all levels of informal and formal education.
What do we know about behavioural change? A suggested approach is awareness creation on interlinkages: good nutrition, costs at the household level in terms of ailments (diabetes, high blood pressures, heart diseases, some cancers) and money. People are more likely to buy into practices that help them avoid ill health and economic costs.
How relevant is the inclusion of nutrition-sensitive agriculture in the curricular of colleges and universities, especially in countries where extension services have been privatized? The emerging reality in most developing countries is that students graduating from agricultural colleges and universities are limited to working with large agricultural private farms; most of which are in agriculture as a business, where mono-cropping brings the most economic returns. In such situations, the trained personnel might not have a chance to convince the farm owners on the need to diversify crops for the benefit of people’s nutrition! Which is the best approach to work with the private sector on nutrition sensitive agriculture?
Whenever I talk about food security and food choices in my mother tongue or national language, people have asked me “is food and nutrition a science or a cultural practice?”
Integrating nutrition into the curriculum would take the following into consideration: