- Author: Ann King Filmer
California's drinking age of 21 prohibits many undergraduate students from learning critical skills early in their academic careers — sensory skills that they will need when they move on to jobs in the multimillion-dollar winemaking, brewing, and food industries.
Not until students turn 21 can they taste the wine and beer they make and learn to assess its sensory quality. Learning the characteristics of a wide assortment of good (and not-so-good) wines and beers is an important component of winemaking and brewing. Having to wait until their junior or senior year to learn these skills is a disadvantage for these students.
Legislation (AB 1989) has been proposed by California Assemblyman Wesley Chesbro (D-North...
- Author: Eve Hightower
On an unusually cool July morning at the UC Davis Student Farm, students are harvesting tomatoes and other produce for the farm’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) membership program. The CSA baskets are pre-sold to members of the campus community and are among the ways students participate in the campus food system.
“It’s more than a way to sell food. It builds community, and that’s a powerful thing for students to learn,” said Raoul Adamchak, who coordinates the CSA and the Market Garden where the produce is grown.
Over the years, those involved in UC campuses’ food systems have garnered powerful lessons from...
- Posted By: Alec Rosenberg
- Written by: Harry Mok
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when organic was a foreign word to most Americans, students at UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz were part of a wave of environmental activism that sought alternatives to agricultural methods that distanced people from farms and relied on heavy use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers.
In 1971, student enthusiasm for a garden at UC Santa Cruz that used natural cultivation methods grew so much so that 14 acres were set aside for the UC Santa Cruz Farm and Garden to create more opportunities to research...
- Author: Ann King Filmer
Two terms related to food production — “sustainability” and “food systems” — have been blended into a new major at the University of California, Davis. Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems, the new undergraduate major, in some ways embodies a re-blossomed, student-driven interest in food production, akin to the organic farming movement of the 1970s.
Food systems is a broad term that addresses nutrition and health, sustainable agriculture, and community development. A food system encompasses the entire production chain, not only from farm to fork, but includes broader topics such as short- and long-term impacts on the environment, labor, management of food inputs (e.g., water, pesticides) and outputs (e.g., waste), and the...
- Author: Shelby MacNab
Imagine a large grassy field on a sunny May morning transformed into the largest classroom in town for nutrition education. Open quiet space quickly became an experiential classroom as over 200 fourth- and fifth-grade students descended to learn about making healthy choices.
The University of California Cooperative Extension’s Youth Nutrition Education Program and the Network for a Healthy California’s Children’s PowerPlay! program partnered at an elementary school in Fresno to introduce students to edible plant parts,...