Ontario Grain Farmer November 2021

Good in Every Grain 34 www.GoodinEveryGrain.ca FOOD LITERACY Food literacy encompasses a large skill set which helps individuals safely prepare delicious and affordable meals for themselves and their families. Food literacy goes beyond ensuring meals are healthy and knowing how to cook different ingredients, it involves helping people have a greater overall understanding of how food gets to their grocery stores, and ultimately, their plates. At Good in Every Grain, we are dedicated to improving the general consumer’s food literacy by providing them with trustworthy information on where their food comes from, how it is grown, and the people who grow their food. Resources dedicated to educating consumers on where their food comes from can be found on the Good in Every Grain website. Now we wish to help individuals improve their food literacy through hands-on food and cooking skills. Recently, we wrote a set of blog posts about various food skills that consumers could improve on using Ontario grains. There are studies which show the linkages between increased food skills and food literacy and the demand for locally grown products: increased food skills and food literacy result in an increase in demand for locally grown food products. Encouraging Ontarians to improve their food skills, will help them grow their understanding of preparing their own food and learning how their food is grown. Food skills include knowing how to cook various ingredients, knowing how to make substitutions in recipes, the ability to read food labels, purchasing food with large health benefits at a low cost, being able to plan out meals in advance, having a large base of recipes that individuals are familiar with and knowing how to cook those recipes, and much more. Developing these food skills can help to increase an individual’s food literacy. The series of articles we featured that were aimed at improving consumer’s food skills were targeted directly at the food skills listed above. While we understand that this list of food skills is not exhaustive, it is a strong starting point and covers many different areas of improving an individual’s food skills and overall level of food literacy, by using Ontario grains as an example. The first article that we featured was “Upgrade your food skills: building a foundation”. This article was targeted at developing very basic food skills such as how to prepare different grains such as whole wheat pasta, oats, and barley. This article also began to introduce the reader to the various whole grain substitutions that can be made to any recipe and describes any modifications that you may need to make if substituting one grain ingredient for another. The second article, “Upgrade your food skills: at the grocery store”, focused on improving food skills at the grocery store and purchasing various food products. This article goes over some of the common food label claims that a consumer may