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On March 30, 2020, the Ministère de l’Éducation et de l’Enseignement supérieur (MEES) launched the Open School educational platform to give parents and youngsters the tools they need to learn at home during these unprecedented times brought on by the coronavirus crisis. Équiterre was tasked by the MEES with creating, in conjunction with the Table québécoise sur la saine alimentation (TQSA), a new section on food under the government platform’s “Other Ressources for Parents” heading, as an added feature for educational exploration.
“In my time at Équiterre, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with many TQSA members who are as passionate as I am about healthy, local and sustainable food. In their respective organizations, they have developed invaluable resources to help impress upon our children the importance but also the pleasure of eating well! It was important for me to share these resources with as many households as possible during these unprecedented times, but also – and more importantly – to make it easy to have fun and enjoy! The games, tips, recipes and gardening ideas in this new section will give you the tools, information or inspiration you need. At the very least, it should whet your appetite! The only ingredient that we can’t do without is fun! Because it’s by making it fun to eat well, buy local and cook and garden with our families that we can pass along healthy eating habits to our kids!”
- Murielle Vrins, Institutional Food Project Manager at Équiterre
The Eating section on the government platform provides numerous web resources to students and their families. They are organized around four main themes:
- Eating well – for our health / public health, and for a healthy lifestyle;
- Buying local – for our food sovereignty, for solidarity and for farmer resilience;
- Cooking – for improving food literacy and know-how, and strengthening social and family connections;
- Gardening – for getting closer to the land, relying on locally grown food and developing a sustainable way of life.
It is now possible to discover this new Eating section on each of the Preschool, Elementary and Secondary pages (in the Other Activities section) of the ecoleouverte.ca website. This section will offer you:
- Useful resources to learn more about healthy eating and its principles;
- Direct links to promote our local food and encourage our agricultural producers;
- Culinary activities to discover with the children and lots of easy recipes to make at home;
- Tips and tricks to start your seedlings, garden with the kids and have fun getting your - hands in the ground.
Guided by its expertise in sustainable food, Équiterre advocates an overarching vision of a resilient food and agricultural system where the supply of local, sustainable food is central to finding solutions for our health and for the environment.
We are very excited that the government is placing these issues at the forefront of educating future generations, and we hope that the unique opportunity posed by these uncertain times to become more resilient in our approach to perceiving and consuming food allows us to make the necessary paradigm shifts in our society.
