Build Taste for Younger Generation
Pacific island must work to encourage young people to change their eating habits to follow a healthier diet.
Pacific island must work to encourage young people to change their eating habits to follow a healthier diet.
The Secretariat of the Pacific Community told journalists from the region currently gathered in Samoa to drive this point home when reporting on agriculture.
The organizations Manager Operations, Performance and Systems Karen Mapusua said it was about changing taste.
She spoke yesterday at a Media Masterclass run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Apia, Samoa.
Mapusua said community plays a crucial role to help future generation choose a healthier lifestyle.
‘Now days it very hard to change the eating habit of someone at my age but if you get to younger children and change the those taste from younger age then we have a hope.’
‘There are couple of things we can do obviously by trying to get our family together include more local food in the daily diet. It can help to have garden at home so that it easy just to pull out things from the garden and added in for what has been cooking,’ she said.
Mapusua added that older generation needed to put in more effort to providing more local food for its youth.
The media masterclass, funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) took place ahead of the Pacific week of Agriculture which officially opened today.
Journalists from Tuvalu, Samoa, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, Solomon Islands and Tonga met in Samoa ahead of the Pacific Week of Agriculture in an initiative called Celebrating Agriculture in the News – or CAN.
CAN sought stories of agriculture from emerging journalists and communications professionals in an effort to create more media coverage of the Pacific’s agricultural issues.
Mapusua reminded the media that communicating healthy messages was important.
‘We need to start talking about food in school by having school garden and exposing little kids to new taste and new ideas right from their first day of school.’
“We are very price sensitive consumer in the Pacific. We can choose rice over taro if it is cheap and that’s are big issue when it comes to food because what we eat impact on our health in a big way.”
“We have a sort of cultural struggle about still having that idea for higher values when actually our own fruits are so rich and healthy. We have a lot to offer to the rest of the world in terms of our local food, said Mapusua.”
The journalists who are part of CAN will be part of a joint pacific effort to produce agricultural research stories which are both interesting and informative.
