With the addition of new classes comes more opportunities for students to study in specific fields of interest and more possible pathways for future careers. The new Nutrition and Food Sciences class will allow students to learn about nutrition on both a personal health and scientific level.
The teacher and creator of this new class, Ms. Markell Reid, compared it to other courses based on food and cooking in the Family and Consumer Sciences department.
“I think a lot of the students could benefit from having more nutrition information on the science side,” Reid said. “Our original cooking classes have a ton of hands-on [activities] and it’s mainly focused on cooking.”
Even though there are differences between the new and old classes, the ones that have been around for years have inspired students to become interested in nutrition and other food science topics.
“I actually took Essentials of Cooking and Baking this year, which Ms. Reid taught, and we learned a lot about nutrition in that class,” sophomore and prospective nutrition student Melanie Foca said.
The class content is proposed to boost academic knowledge about nutrition and give students insight into their own nutritional habits.
“I think one of the planning goals of the course is for students to just have increased facility to use knowledge of nutrition in their everyday life,” Director of Secondary Teaching, Learning, and Innovation Dr. Leslie Pratt said.
This aspect of the course is relevant to why many students might be interested in choosing the nutrition elective, one that Foca points out.
“I think this could just help me have a better understanding of what really your body does need to function maximally and what foods might be the best choices for your body,” she said.
In addition to benefiting personal health, Reid listed career paths that could come from taking nutrition, including fields like biology, health sciences, and others in which students have shown interest.
“If you want to become a dietitian, this class is great for that,” Reid said.
Because of the many careers that can come from studying nutrition, the class can also be used as a testing ground for students to experiment with their interests.
“One of my career goals at this moment is actually to become a dietitian,” Foca said. “So I definitely was interested in taking this class because I felt like it could help me realize if that was the right choice for me.”
Reid herself was a dietitian for five years and studied nutrition for many years before becoming a teacher, earning the admiration of other teachers at Strath Haven.
“The whole department is inspiring,” Pratt said. “Her [Reid’s] previous background is as a nutritionist, so she was able to bring a level of expertise to both of the foods courses, which was already amazing.”
Recalling her own experience with nutrition classes, Reid notes how this new elective option could help to prepare kids for college.
“When you get to a university, it’s a lot of nutrition information that you didn’t even have any idea could be out there, and it actually can tend to be a difficult class,” Reid said. “So I think that would prep kids and make it easier down the line.”
Pratt emphasized that the addition of this new nutrition and food sciences course is an exciting change that allows more freedom for FCS classes.
“We can have an elective class that invites you to think differently about the science classes that you had taken in the past and maybe pull some of those concepts in,” Pratt said.
The foreseeable benefits of this new nutrition class and the importance of nutrition in both everyday life and work life give Reid hope for the future of nutrition education at Strath Haven and elsewhere.
“I think it’s going to be a class that’s required ongoing in the future,” Reid said. “That’d be really great.
