I’ve written a number of pieces in the past highlighting what I viewed as everyday symptoms of childrens’ disassociation with their environment and in turn nature as a whole. However, blogging is one thing, having a study means I own everyone’s house!…… no not really…… it just tells us what everyone could see if they stopped long enough to look.
Excerpts below -the full article can be read from the link above.
‘A national survey of year 6 and 10 students by the Australian Council for Educational Research found yawning gaps in young people’s knowledge of basic food origins.
In a hypothetical lunch box of bread, cheese and a banana, only 45 per cent in year 6 could identify all three as from farms.
The Primary Industries Education Foundation, which commissioned the research to be released today, said the findings were a ”wake-up” call.
”We’re a very urbanised nation,” said the foundation’s chairman, Cameron Archer. ”Food is relatively cheap. Everyone takes it for granted and we’re quite complacent about our well-being.”
”I was surprised that some of these very, very basic relationships weren’t understood,” he said. ”It’s fascinating you can have a big bale of hay one day and then milk to produce a few thousand lattes the next day.”
The survey found most children believed timber was mostly harvested from native forests and about a third thought wildlife could not survive on farmed land.
‘The end result of being so separated from our food is that we really devalue our farmers,” the president of the alliance, Liz Millen, said. ”We tend to think that we’ve got an endless supply [of food],” she said.’
