World Food Day 2024 - Knead Kindness, Feed the World
World Food Day is an event observed every year on the 16th of October, and focuses on acute issues that include food shortages, food wastage, and poor nutritional health, often in tandem with the broader United Nations Sustainable Goal 2, ‘Zero Hunger’. This year, Round Square leaders aligned the annual WFD to the UN’s theme for World Food Day 2024: ‘Right to Foods for a Better Life and a Better Future’. Throughout the event in school, they explored issues of paramount importance that have always affected peoples’ lives all around the world in both developed and developing countries, such as food insecurity, food distribution inequality, and food scarcity, while ensuring that students of all ages were able to grasp the gravity of these issues and learn how they could help solve them.
For the younger participants in the Primary Years Programme, the leaders introduced the idea of food inequality through ice-breaking questions, later getting them to share their perspectives on what steps would help them resolve this pressing issue. The young students were deeply insightful, and reflected their collaborative thoughts on posters, which were displayed in the cafeteria. Finally, the group played a quick ‘thumbs up or thumbs down’ game, to reflect on their day’s learnings from World Food Day 2024. The older students from the PYP engaged in a ‘hangman’ game that encouraged them to imbibe the core values of sharing and saving food, allowing these students to be reflective and deepen their understanding of the purpose of celebrating World Food Day.
The students from the Middle Years Programme, reflected on the reality of the lack of equal access to food throughout the world, expanding their focus to encompass both a historical and modern perspective on the matter. This was achieved by enacting a skit with disparity in availability of food, followed by an engaging class discussion, and a crossword puzzle to summarize their learnings from the module planned for them.
Students were able to successfully reflect the ever-constant nature of the difficulty of realistically being able to achieve a ‘universal right to food’. The crossword game, requiring critical analysis and quick-thinking skills, demonstrated strong problem-solving skills by the MYP learners.
The students from the senior school delved deep into the intricacies of food scarcity, its effects on people and its systemic causes. They also learned more about the complex technological and scientific solutions to the problem, which ultimately inspired them to become future change makers and innovators. The World Food Day Team curated a video with ‘Freddie the Foodie’, their mascot to portray the dual nature of food insecurity. It combined statistics and footage of those in need of food and contrasted it with footage of Freddie’s food wastage in the school cafeteria followed by an exciting jeopardy game.
In addition to these activities, the Art Co-curricular Activity provided students from grades 6-8 an opportunity to participate in the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s official World Food Day poster competition. The students created insightful artworks that combined elements of Indian culture and merged it with a keen global approach. Their creativity was inspired by the engaging discussions and activities organized over the week-long celebration by the senior Round Square team to effectively commemorate World Food Day 2024.
Overall, World Food Day this year raised awareness and called for action among students on a variety of impactful issues - from food insecurity and what that means to people, to the causes and consequences of unequal food distribution. It enriched students’ perspectives on these multifaceted problems and helped inculcate amongst students the skills to solve those problems in the real world.
