Mayor Chu: Promote food safety and organic and environmental ideals through agri
Mayor Chu: Promote food safety and organic and environmental ideals through agricultural education
As part of the promotion for agricultural education, New Taipei City held a cooking competition today at Donghai High School of New Taipei City’s Sanchong District. In this middle-school, creative pizza contest, every team’s recipe must include an organic ingredient provided by its school. When Mayor Chu handed out the awards, the pizzas were just coming out of the ovens, and the mayor remarked on how good the pizzas smelled. Mayor Eric Chu said that through events such as this, the city government is reinforcing organic and healthy vegetable concepts in public education, and these events also serve as an opportunity for students to explore their vocational calling.
Mayor Eric Chu said that there are currently over 100 organic school campuses in New Taipei City. Teachers and students, through planting and consuming their own organic vegetables, can enjoy the sense of safety offered by eating food made themselves. The city government is starting with schools to promote organic and safe food concepts and environmental awareness through agricultural education. The city hopes to maintain a good, livable environment for future generations and also to become a pillar and model for the Taiwanese organic farming industry.
The Education Department reports that New Taipei City has, for years, promoted healthy school lunches made with organic vegetables, thus realizing concepts of organic and healthy vegetable cuisines in schools. Today, in conjunction with the food and agriculture education promotional initiative, the city chose Donghai High School of Sanchong to hold the “Organic and healthy vegetable cuisine competition.” The event also had parallel tours of the on-site organic farm, demonstrations of organic ingredients, and a live organic market experience.
In today’s creative cuisine competition, the contestants were separated into the teachers and parents group and the students group. The teachers and parents used “organic, toxic-free, healthy” as their theme and created a “green and low-carbon healthy diet.” The students group was composed of middle school students from schools that have demonstrated good results in their agricultural education programs. The competition included making freestyle pizzas and demonstrating the achievements of agricultural education. Each team’s recipes for their pizzas needed to include one organic ingredient that was produced by their school.
For today’s event, aside from learning about the fruits of agricultural education from the students, the mayor also presented certificates of thanks to the sponsors of this event, including Yuanmao Agriculture Inc, Dingtianliao Educational Farm, Fanshuliao Organic Farm, Agan Organic Farm, Donghai Middle School, a total of five sponsors. The Education Department used this event as opportunity to promote agricultural education. The organic and healthy recipes will be collected and provided to schools, student lunch catering companies, and other organizations for reference.