The Center for Food & Environment focuses on research, education, and policy. Its research seeks to understand why people make the food choices they do, the food system context within which choices are made, and the types of interventions that facilitate voluntary adoption of more healthful and sustainable food choices. In the educational arena, the center develops, evaluates, and disseminates nationally curricula on the links between food, health, personal behavior, and the environment, conducts professional development, and provides educational outreach to the community. Policy work focuses on efforts to make the healthful and ecologically sustainable food and activity choices the easy choices in schools and communities.
The objective of this five-year NIH Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) grant is to examine the effectiveness C3, an obesity-prevention curriculum. C3 is the middle school module of the Linking Food and the Environment Curriculum Series. C3 consists of 20 inquiry-based science lessons taught over 8--10 weeks to address potential mediating variables from social cognitive and self-determination theories. The C3 curriculum combines inquiry-based science education processes to address outcome expectations and self-determined motivation (the combination of competence, autonomy, and enjoyment) with goal-setting skills to address perceived barriers and self-efficacy to improve eating and physical activity behaviors related to obesity risk. A student outcome evaluation was conduced in New York City with 10 middle schools during the 2006-07 school year. During the dissemination phase in 2007-09 the curriculum has been taught in several sites in Michigan, in Hayward, CA, and in Philadelphia, PA. Please visit www.tc.edu/cfe/choice.html for more information.
The objective of this two-year NIH Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant (2009-2011) is to work in partnership with Stottler Henke Inc. to develop, implement, and evaluate the effectiveness of a "serious" educational computer game based on the Choice, Control, & Change curriculum. In the game, students will care for the health of creatures and along the way learn why healthful dietary and activity choices are important and how-to incorporate healthful choices into their lives, while setting and tracking personal behavior change goals. The behavioral and potential mediators are the same as for the C3 curriculum, listed above. The LiFESim game will be evaluated for student outcomes using a cluster-randomized, intervention-control, pre-post design in schools in Northern Manhattan and the Bronx.
The objectives of this research funded by the Iijima Memorial Foundation in Japan was to gather family meal practice data of United States children to add to data sets collected in Japan, Korea, and Australia. A convenience sample of 331 children ages 10-14 from New York, Texas and California completed a survey and drew pictures to represent their evening meal on the previous day. The findings were interesting: of the 301 students who ate their breakfast on the survey day, only 7% of students ate their breakfast with all the members of their family. Nearly a half of children answered that they ate their breakfast alone. About 40% of children ate previous dinner with all the members of their family present and 32% with some members of family including an adult. When asked about who they would like to eat breakfast with, 12% answered that they like to eat alone and 45% that they would like to eat with all family members. For dinner, 13% of children preferred to eat dinner alone, while. 68% preferred to eat with all members of the family. To the statement, I enjoy eating meals with my family 85% agreed or strongly agreed. These results show that it is important to work with families to give children more opportunities to eat meals with the adults and other children in their family.
The EarthFriends program began in the mid-1970s as the educational arm of the Nutrition Education Resources Project. EarthFriends provides direct services to children, parents, and teachers that are all becoming "EarthFriends", "eating foods that are good for me and good for the planet." To make sense of how to translate this into every day food choices, EarthFriends frames activities around the seven chapters of the whole story of food: growing, transporting, changing, packaging, buying, cooking and eating, and disposing or reusing. The EarthFriends Learning Laboratory at Teachers College contains a full working kitchen where up to 30 students can visit to prepare and eat a meal. At EarthFriends, meals are based around fresh, local, seasonal ingredients, primarily purchased at Farmers' Markets.
Linking Food and the Environment (LiFE) is a collaboration of the Science Education and Nutrition Education programs at Teachers College Columbia University. It was established in 1996 with the vision of promoting scientific habits of mind through thoughtful, inquiry-based activities that integrate the study of food, food systems, and environmental and personal health. National Gardening Association publishes the first two modules of the series, Growing Food and Farm to Table & Beyond. Growing Food explores the question, "How does nature provide us with food?" Farm to Table & Beyond explores the question, "What is the system that gets food from farm to table and how does that system affect the environment?" Choice, Control, & Change, that explores the question, "How can we use scientific evidence to help us make healthful food and activity choices?" will be the third module of the series. For more information, please visit www.tc.edu/cfe/overviews.html
The development, evaluation, and dissemination of LiFE has been funded by a Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) RR 25 RR12374 from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Additional funding for publication was provided from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation for the Rethinking Food, Health, and the Environment: Making Learning Connections, a joint project of the Center for Ecoliteracy and Teachers College Columbia University. For more information, please visit www.rethinkingschoollunch-life.org.
Since 2006, the Center for Food and Environment staff and Program in Nutrition students have worked in partnership with Harlem RBI (www.harlemrbi.org) to provide cooking and food-based lessons to the third through sixth grade students that participate in Harlem RBI's after school and summer camp program.
In partnership with the Center for Ecoliteracy, Berkeley, CA, we convened two five-day Professional Development Institutes for teams from schools and school districts, with most teams consisting of an administrator, food service person, one or more teachers, and a parent. The goal of the Institute was for schools to combine a positive food environment with education about the interactions of food, food systems, personal health, and the natural environment through the LiFE curriculum series. This project was supported by a grant of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
The mission of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation funded NYC Food and Fitness Partnership is to engage communities in making the healthy choice the easy choice by creating equitable access to healthy, quality, affordable foods and opportunities for active living, starting in the neighborhoods of highest need. The three target neighborhoods are East and Central Harlem in Manhattan, South Bronx, and the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Currently, the partnership is in its second year of planning with official implementation to begin in late 2009. As the evaluators, we will gather data that describes the current food and activity environment of the target neighborhoods and track policy and system changes that are implemented, along with using primary and secondary data sources to collect data on dietary and activity behavior changes and data on changes in health parameters. For more information please visit www.nycfoodandfitness.org.
There are no upcoming events at this time.
To view past events, please go to the Events page