With regard to the agriculture food science course, I went to Sussex Regional High School, just over the way here. Agriculture was an elective. In the run of a year, you had approximately 45 kids who took the agriculture course. Home economics was an elective as well. As you said, it was all girls. You know, if you were a man, you took automotive; if you were a girl, you took home economics. It's that generation thing.
What I would like to see is a mandatory curriculum in which you have to take English, you have to take history, and you have to take math to graduate. I'd like to see something in there that is mandatory, that you take an agriculture food science course, in order to graduate high school.
Maybe high school might be a little bit too late to bring this in. Maybe we need to bring curriculum into the elementary school, but I do believe that somewhere along the line you should have to experience within the course what happens at the farm level to get the food produced, because of course it has to start somewhere. It would be great to be able to see how the food is produced, talk to farmers, see processes, bring farmers in as guest speakers. Many of us sitting on this board, I know, would be very willing to go into the school system and give a talk to a group of students to teach them about what we do.
It's also very important to food preparation, how to store food, how to handle it, what to look for when you're buying it. Right now when you walk into the grocery store, as Jonathan mentioned earlier, and see strawberries, you don't look at where they're grown or how they were grown. You simply buy strawberries because they're $1.75, and you know you love them. If you had a little bit more knowledge and background of what happens with that food and where it comes from, you would look a little bit closer and try to buy something that would support your local farmers and keep everything going.
So I think it is very important to have a curriculum out there that goes over the processes of how food is planted, how food is grown, how you prepare it, how you store it, and how you cook it before you eat it. I think you'd see a big difference in society if we had something like that in the school system.