Food skills are an important part of creating and sustaining healthy local food systems.
Working with experts within our region, we offer interactive food skills workshops all year. We help you learn how to add activities like gardening, composting, fermenting, baking and more, to your life.
What are food skills anyway?
We think of food skills as invaluable to creating and eating ecologically responsible food. What were once inherent teachings throughout generations such as foraging, growing and preserving food, important food skills are now removed from most of us as we depend heavily on store-bought, imported foods.
Our food has a life of its own, and understanding this helps cultivate our understanding of food as a living thing. We teach theoretical elements and practical knowledge from gardening to composting, and seed saving to fermenting, which reflect the whole, interconnected life cycle our of food.
These workshops can help you make simple but significant changes towards an environmentally-sound lifestyle. We provide you with knowledge about the connection between our environment and the food we eat, allowing you to better support a responsible food system here at home and across the planet.
Food skills help create real change.
Our workshops address the environmental impacts of our food system, especially emissions that contribute to climate change. These include greenhouse gases such as carbon and methane, which are found in all aspects of our food from production to disposal.
Our food comes from all over the world, where large-scale, industrialized practices have also led to habitat and biodiversity loss of wild plants and animals. This long-distance import system also has many negative effects on our environment through transportation and processing.
Food is a big part of our life every day. There is incredible value in starting with food to make big environmental change. We help you learn the skills needed to decrease your own ecological footprint from sourcing, preparing and consuming food.
A workshop for everyone.
Each year we cover many different facets of the food system, and teach you how to put your new skills to use. For total beginners, we hold gardening basics workshops as well as seed starting, container gardening, and even how to build a backyard composter and other food waste solutions.
Some other exciting workshops have revolved around wild foods, where we have taken hikes to identify and forage for edible plants. We cover pests in the garden, and how to safely remove them, as well as how to grow Fall greens in a greenhouse and other growing techniques such as sprouting and no-till gardening.
Our workshops also include elements of preparing food naturally at home like baking sourdough, using culinary herbs, and fermenting foods such as sauerkraut and kombucha. We’ve even held workshops on beekeeping and keeping backyard chickens, and the many benefits of both.
We couldn’t hold these workshops without our amazing facilitators, or the support of organizations like Food First NL. Funding for our workshops since they began has come from the Western Regional Wellness Coalition, the Community Healthy Living Fund, the Community Foundation of NL, the City of Corner Brook and the TD Friends of the Environment Foundation.
