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Posted on January 23, 2023
World Food Crisis Conclusion - Promoting Food Education and Waste Reduction - "MoriZen" for Sustainable Diets
Siu Hu brings children and adults together to experience natural farming.
While environmental change, food scarcity and malnutrition are affecting countries around the world, on the other side of the world there is the constant problem of food waste. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that one-third of the world's food is thrown away or wasted in the process of getting from the place of production to the table, and that this food loss is enough to feed 1.26 billion hungry people.
Hu Jingyi (Siu Hu) was introduced to the CD-ROM campaign in 2014 and began visiting elementary school campuses to encourage children not to waste food, and recently resigned from her job to set up the "Mori-State" studio, which is dedicated to promoting food education and advocating a lifestyle of sustainable eating.
"The food crisis has always existed, and the UN shouts out all kinds of big goals every year, one of which is to solve the food problem; I read and watch documentaries a lot, and the more I watch, the more nervous I get, and the more the sense of crisis grows stronger, because the environment is changing far more quickly than we are destroying it."
Support for local products
I asked Hu to meet me at a coffee shop, and before the interview, she decided to order a hand-brewed coffee. Walking up to the counter, the clerk took out the packaging and introduced two types of beans, one from Ethiopia and the other from Guatemala. Xiaohu habitually searched for product information on the package and slowly said, "Neither one is local coffee yet ...... Well ...... but this one is processed in Malaysia, let's go with this one!"
Unlike the pursuit of color and flavor, her thinking about food has always been inseparable from a concept of sustainable consumption - supporting local products.
"Eating sustainably is the key to solving the food crisis."
Siu Hu, who is also the director of SustainableX Sustainable Community Association, has been promoting natural farming and food education in Malaysia for a long time. Perhaps because of her experience in producing children's programs, she is always able to use the simplest, easy-to-understand and interesting way to talk about food, from the simplest land to the dinner plate, and then slowly bring out the supply and consumption chain behind food, to awaken people to the food crisis.
"From the production of food to how to return leftovers to the land, including what contributes to the growth of a plant, the whole food chain link is something I look at more than anything else."
Food education covers food nutrition, food safety, food culture literacy, and the food chain, and then extends to kitchen education, edible campuses, slow food culture, and other educational units with different emphases. Simply put, as long as it is about food and people, it can be included in the scope of food education.
胡静怡（右二）为一桌四人讲解游戏。（森态提供）
小胡积极提倡购买在地食物，比如马来西亚生产的印尼种酪梨（avocado）的体积等于一般国外进口酪梨的2至3倍，风味也不输人！
从土地到餐桌 推广光盘行动
2014年9月至2016年8月，小胡担任Happymove农耕光盘行动总策划，带着团队走入雪隆区校园推广光盘行动和展开短期课程和生活营，陪伴小学生手作环保、育苗、拔菜、烹调的过程。
食物教育不应只停留在纸上谈兵，她设计的活动几乎都需要让小朋友亲自动手。“种菜的时候，你会期盼它的成长，如果付出后发现收成不如预期就会感到失落，从中感受到食物得来不易，才会珍惜。”
她分享，自己在光汉小学展开的光盘行动重视不要浪费食物，先让小朋友有一个种子概念，从认识土地、土壤性质、如何照料到最后的餐桌饮食习惯，都在引导小朋友动态地学习。
“只有土地才可以让小朋友直接地感受，所以我尝试找很多有机小农合作，到农田办生活营。”小胡配合不同的受众灵活性地设计教程，不局限在狭隘的食物认识，而是围绕饮食永续的核心。去年12月，她与环境教育平台Let’sRE合作，到康乐华小合作举办3天2夜的《森活观察家体验营》，带着小学生亲手烹饪午餐同时感受大自然。她甚至到学校培训老师，因为教育者才是关键人物，否则这个理念很难延续下去。
小胡鼓励父母携同孩子参加一系列认识食物的活动，建立彼此与食物的连结。
The Mori Studio has partnered with a dietary therapy-cum-nutritionist to advocate for healthy eating education.
From September 2014 to August 2016, Hu served as the chief planner of the Happymove Farming CD-ROM Action, taking her team to the campus in Cherokee District to promote the CD-ROM Action and launch short-term courses and life camps, accompanying primary school students in the process of hand-crafting environmental protection, seedling raising, pulling vegetables and cooking.
Food education should not remain on paper, and almost all of the activities she designs require children to do the work themselves. "When you plant a vegetable, you look forward to its growth, and if you pay and realize that the harvest is not as good as you expected, you will feel disappointed, and from this, you will feel that food is not easy to come by, so you will cherish it."
She shared that the CD-ROM action she started at Guanghan Elementary School places importance on not wasting food, first giving children a seed concept, and guiding them dynamically from recognizing the land, the nature of the soil, how to take care of it, to the final eating habits at the table.
"Only the land can be directly felt by children, so I try to find many organic small farmers to work with and run life camps in the farmland." Xiaohu designs tutorials flexibly to suit different audiences, not limiting herself to a narrow understanding of food, but centering around the core of dietary sustainability. Last December, she partnered with Let'sRE, an environmental education platform, to organize a three-day, two-night Mori Life Observer Experience Camp at Hong Lehua Elementary School, taking elementary school students to cook lunch by hand and experience nature at the same time. She even went to the school to train the teachers, as the educators are the key players, otherwise it would be difficult for the concept to continue.
Children become "picketers" to alert their parents.
"I'm not practicing environmental education but communication, and I've always wanted what I do to be connected to the community."
Hu's exposure to the CD-ROM campaign came about eight years ago when she was working in a multimedia studio and happened to meet educator Ms. Cheung Wai-chee, who initiated the CD-ROM campaign, prompting their first public service-type collaboration, which involved going to campuses to promote CD-ROMs.
In terms of strategy, she proposed to start with local food. Although she is not an academic herself, she started to read a lot of books and documentaries on food education because of the CD-ROM campaign," she says with a smile. She laughs, "It's the first time I've ever made an exception to read so many books, all about food culture and food education, all the time, when I wake up I read! It was all about finding answers and seeing how this stuff [food issues] could be solved."
At the beginning of October 2022, she set up the Mori State Studio as a platform for long-term food education, one of the main objectives of which is to educate about raw materials in nature, and to try to collaborate with different non-government and environmental organizations to hold workshops, camps, or sharing sessions, mainly targeting primary school students.
Of course, not all children will be able to understand the complexity of the food crisis or change their eating habits, but she hopes that she can plant the seeds of social and humanistic concern for them, and then draw more attention to the food issue.
Siu Hu allows children to handle food and cook with their own hands, from which they are encouraged to reduce food waste.
"The effectiveness is actually only 30% or 40%, but these are positive people who may start practicing in their small places and lands at home, and they will influence more people."
She shared that some of the children who attended the food education program even went home and became "little picketers", reminding their parents not to waste food and to use compact discs!
"In fact, we are using children's language to tell adults about these concepts." Siu-woo often emphasizes the concept of "no food, no time" in her activities, which means not eating food that is not produced in this season, not eating food that is not needed by the body, and thinking about how to promote local food.
In addition to online promotions, Woo also organizes various offline educational activities to reintroduce children to the "mystery of food". Interested parties can follow the "Mori Mori" Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/Osentai.
National awareness of the food crisis is low.
Even after experiencing food shortages, food grabbing, and hoarding during the coronary epidemic, Hu believes that too few people really care about the food subject, and more people have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude.
"The awakening of our society to the food crisis is low, unless there is a day when it is slightly felt like a National Movement Control Order (MCO) when food is bought even if it's expensive, but people also don't understand the severity and urgency of the overall situation because we are not in a state of no food for a long period of time," he said.
"It's one of those things that's harder to feel and you don't cry out in pain until a pinprick hits you."
In addition to valuing food, Siu Hu's future education plan covers dietary nutrition and safety, including how to choose food, read ingredient labels, and even direct children to make fast food and sugary drinks, from which they can determine healthiness and differentiate between pigments and natural colors, among other things.
In addition to poverty, which prevents access to healthy food, there is also a growing emphasis on modern urban diseases such as obesity, hyperglycemia, myocardial infarction, and physiological aging. According to the Malaysian National Health and Morbidity Survey, it was found that one in every 15 people in the country suffers from obesity, which has the risk of causing cardiovascular blockage. In addition, 3.9 million people suffer from diabetes and 6.4 million from hypertension.
Hope that environmental food education will be incorporated into the education system
A self-proclaimed child of Sabah's Windy Underground, Hu grew up with a strong relationship with nature and is pained by the destruction she witnesses of the environment, which in turn is closely related to resource allocation.
She cites food agriculture as an example: "You keep planting and claiming other people's land and water in a certain field, but when the desire and need diminishes and you don't need to plant as much, can't the land age more slowly, with less damage to the environment and less reclaimed land?
"If we didn't have a society today that was so forced to get something, wouldn't there be a more even distribution of resources? These are all questions of consciousness." It is through food education that people will think about other countries that may not have access to food because of poverty or uneven distribution, and then empathize and take action to "protect food".
She believes that environmental education and food education will become more and more important, just as many people are actively promoting local food, and hopes that the Ministry of Education will incorporate these concepts into the education system or important curricula in the future.
Globally, 768 million people are hungry
Hundreds of millions of tons of food are still wasted
There is currently enough food in the global system and it is estimated that the global per capita daily food supply is nearly 3,000 calories, 85 grams of protein and 90 grams of fat per person, which is far more than the metabolism required for a healthy human life, and that the main causes of hunger and malnutrition are poverty and inequality of distribution, which also include excessive food loss and waste.
The United Nations predicts that the global population will reach 9 billion by 2050 and 10 billion by 2100, with India set to overtake China as the world's most populous country next year. Due to poor food distribution, a very large number of people in several corners of the world still live below the poverty line, struggling for three meals a day.
Globally, from 135 million people in 2019, 597 million people in 89 countries currently do not have enough food, mostly located in poor people in Africa.
Ironically, even if 768 million people globally are chronically hungry and undernourished in 2020, nearly 17% or hundreds of millions of tons of food is still wasted each year. The Food Waste Index Report 2021 states that a total of 931 million tons of food was discarded globally in 2019 in garbage cans at homes, retailers and restaurants.
Some 597 million people around the world don't have enough food, yet hundreds of millions of tons of food are still wasted every year. (file photo)
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