Food safety in preschool is an extremely important issue because it is directly related to children’s health and physical development. Children have an immature immune system, making them susceptible to gastrointestinal infections due to consuming foods contaminated with harmful microorganisms.
To increase awareness and promote food safety practices in preschool, on January 13, 2024, the SAFEGRO project organized a gender-responsive food safety training course for teachers and kitchen staff at Van Duc preschool. Utilizing a participatory approach and experiential learning, teachers and kitchen staff were immersed in the basic principles of food safety and collaboratively built food safety practice processes in all stages, from receiving ingredients to processing food and providing meals for children.
Gender issues were also integrated into the training course, ensuring that participants clearly understood gender roles in food safety practices and nutrition. Games were used as a method to convey gender messages and food safety principles, facilitating easy comprehension of the issues. Teachers can apply games to the topic of food safety education for kids in class.
The course also identified parents as the next target group that needs further instruction on food safety to ensure the well-being of children, both at school and at home.
From their experience, teachers believe that many people are not following food safety principles but mistakenly think they are correct. For example, arranging food messily in the refrigerator, sharing knives and cutting boards between raw and cooked foods, and defrosting foods at room temperature. Therefore, the Board of Directors of Van Duc preschool believes that the training content is very useful and needs to be integrated and conveyed to parents through various means such as parent meetings, training courses, and communication events.
If we all join hands to create an environment that promotes good food safety practices, everyone will benefit, with children being the direct beneficiaries.
This course will be followed by a series of hands-on training sessions conducted by food safety experts for kitchen staff. Meanwhile, teachers will continue to be trained by educational experts on learning through play methods to flexibly integrate food safety topics into the current preschool education program.
This training course is part of the food safety culture education framework of the SAFEGRO project.
