January at The Rhynd

Feb 12
3 min read

A VISIT FROM RHET AND LOCAL SCHOOL CHILDREN

According to the Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland, pupils learn about nutrition, food safety, sustainability and healthy eating. However, on a recent Royal Highland Education Trust (RHET) day at The Rhynd, it was pretty clear that most children had no idea where their food came from.

It was our first time hosting such an event, but we couldn’t have been more thrilled to do so. RHET is a non-profit, education charity that helps young people develop food literacy by “taking the classroom to the countryside”.

Nearly 100 10-year-old children from Leuchars, Tayport, Balmerino and Wormit primary schools descended on the farm to listen to short talks on farm machinery, our polytunnel, scone-making in the café kitchen, vegetables, bee keeping, wildlife crime, dairy and cooking via Quality Meat Scotland. Poor head chef Jack in the kitchen ended the day with about 10,000 scones. I doubt he’s going to want to make them again for a while.

The children then had the misfortune of listening to me for a couple of minutes during lunch. I asked how many of them had needed a doctor in the past year. About 15 put their hands up. I then asked whether any of them had needed a lawyer. A big-hitting boy from the back row wearing a three-piece suit and carrying a yellow legal pad raised his hand. I then asked how many times they had needed a farmer in the past year. A few eager hands went up, so I pointed at a girl looking particularly excited. “Ten!” she shouted. I said that, going on the basis of three meals a day, they had needed a farmer roughly 10,000 times in the past year. Jaws dropped.

Before the day, Project Co-ordinator for the RHET Fife Countryside Initiative Carole Brunton was talking through some of the success stories of the charity. “A mother came up to me a while ago, and she said, ‘you’re the reason my son now looks at the ingredients of what I’m giving him and where the food is from! It’s such a pain!’ I replied that we must be doing something right!”

The children absolutely loved the day. What 10-year-old wouldn’t like getting out of school and climbing into a combine? And I guarantee all of them learnt something about how food is produced and what farmers do.

Too often when waiting in the supermarket checkout queue the basket in front contains beige ultra-processed frozen food, fizzy drinks and a worrying lack of vegetables. I am no saint, and my shopping basket is far from that of an Olympic athlete, but children don’t seem to be learning about the fundamentals of what they’re putting into their bodies daily. If the way to combat that is to get them clambering all over a combine and learning to plant seeds in a polytunnel, bring on the next RHET day.