Two groups of Ivey students – HBA Sustainability Certificate students, and some MSc students and Regenerator participants – recently toured Growing Chefs! Ontario, a local charity focused on food education, where they learned how to create a more equitable, resilient, and eco-friendly food system. Among other things, the students learned how to design, deliver, and evaluate food literacy programs, prepare recipes from a diverse range of cultures, and how to plant, harvest, process, and package ingredients. The HBA students had an additional tour of The Grove Agri-business Incubation Hub where they saw some of the innovative approaches to investing in the incubation and scaling of local agri-businesses. In their blog below, HBA student Ethan Milroy, and MSc student Yaoyu Yu, reflect on the experience.
Ethan Milroy, HBA and Engineering ’25 candidate
My grocery store purchases are typically prompted by thoughts like how amazing it would be to have fresh pineapple with breakfast – I don’t consider the process to get that pineapple there. Over the last 40 years, food availability has changed and you can now get almost any ingredient or premade food you want at most grocery stores. But that change has also led to less sustainable agriculture practices, more food waste, and fewer homemade meals, which in turn reduces the number of school-aged children eating homemade lunches. Enter Growing Chefs!, a registered charity focused on food education and one of Canada’s largest providers of low-cost, healthy, homemade lunches for students. While touring one of its kitchens, our group was given the same lunch children across London were receiving that day: honey mustard chicken, garlic green beans, roast potatoes, squash; and, for dessert, ice cream and a churro bite from a local partner business. I never thought a healthy and delicious meal could be provided to so many people every day in a low-cost and sustainable way.
A more sustainable model
Growing Chefs! also provides food-education services to help people learn about a sustainable food system. Our discussion with Growing Chefs!’ team members about our current food systems was eye-opening. From discarded food to excess packaging for transportation, we learned that our food systems create enormous amounts of waste. By sourcing local food, as Growing Chefs does, we can both reduce food waste and produce an economic benefit. They shared the encouraging statistic that if every household in Ontario bought just $10 of local food each week, this would contribute an extra $2.4 billion to our economy and create more than 10,000 new jobs each year. Reimagining and building a new model is not easy, but should be prioritized given the staggering health, environmental, and financial costs of continuing down our current path.
Cooperation and collaboration
As a member of The Grove, an agri-business hub where participants share resources, Growing Chefs! is working with other local businesses to both improve its community impact and reduce its environmental impact. Fresh low-cost produce is grown on site year-round in greenhouses using soil that is supplemented by a partner worm farm. In addition, all other ingredients for Growing Chefs!’ meals and events are locally sourced from eco-conscious providers. Such collaboration helps grow local businesses and reduces the amount of food waste in the system.
The Grove supports many other agri-tech startup businesses, such as Haggerty AgRobotics, Green City Aquaponics, and IntelliCulture and together these companies learn from each other and develop products and businesses that help drive forward a sustainable agriculture future.
Thanks to our day with Growing Chefs!, I learned that a food model based on collaboration and community can succeed both socially and financially and provide the best outcomes for everyone. I hope many more communities will look to this model to improve the Canadian food system.
Yaoyu Yu, MSc ’24 candidate (Digital Management)
The food system is interconnected with many essential elements, and people's level of food literacy influences their dietary choices, which, in turn, impacts health outcomes across different demographics. Proper food education has long been lacking in our education system. According to a matrix developed by Growing Chefs!, the average food literacy of an adult is equivalent to that of a six-year-old. Most people can’t name the ingredients use in their meals or describe the taste and texture of the food they’re consuming accurately. With diabetes and obesity becoming global health issues, fostering food literacy in children at an early age is a critical priority for Growing Chefs!
Increasing food literacy through program-based learning
Growing Chefs! adopts an experiential approach, incorporating curriculum-based food knowledge into hands-on activities like gardening and cooking. These activities are tailored to children's attention spans and knowledge-levels, helping them develop food literacy step by step. This method fosters a healthier relationship between children and the food they consume. During a pear cobbler-making session, I personally learned a lot about the ingredients, some of which I had never encountered before, that go into just one plate of dessert.
Community empowerment through food education
What truly amazed me about Growing Chefs! is the multiculturalism and economic empowerment embedded in its programming. The organization grows and sources food ingredients that cater to the community's dietary habits, developing recipes that reflect the multi-ethnicity of the communities served. This approach fosters a sense of cultural belonging for newcomers while promoting inclusiveness in Canada's increasingly multicultural society. Additionally, Growing Chefs! develops affordable, healthy meal boxes and delivers them to families in need, directly addressing the intertwined challenges of economic status, nutrition levels, and health development of Canada's next generation.
The role of social enterprises in food networks
After visiting the site and participating in the program, I was deeply impressed by Growing Chefs!’ efforts to rekindle something essential for our health and happiness – our relationship with food. This focus extends beyond just food to fostering relationships with one another. Through our visit, I realized the critical role social enterprises like Growing Chefs! play in orchestrating food knowledge mobilization and championing food policy to build successful, place-based food networks. It also made me realize the need for impact measurement in social enterprises, such as Growing Chefs!, to better understand their influence on the communities they serve, including outcomes related to health and economic empowerment.
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