Scarborough and Whitby MP renews calls for agriculture to be on school curriculum
Sir Robert Goodwill has been speaking at the Great Yorkshire Show
The MP for Scarborough and Whitby is renewing calls for farming and agriculture to be put on to the school curriculum.
Sir Robert Goodwill was speaking at the Great Yorkshire Show in Harrogate saying students should be allowed to take it at GCSE and A-Level.
He said: "Particularly when you go into some of the inner cities, it's how little young children and teenagers know about how their food is produced, where it comes from and more worringly how to produce simple, inexpensive meals in their own kitchen. There's a real call I think to improve the way that young people learn about agriculture and learn about where their food comes from.
"I think when you talk to teachers they already say that the national curriculum is very crowded and maybe one way we could move forward is having a GCSE in agriculture and agriculture-related topics, so you can study that as one of your options at 16 and maybe go on to do an A-Level in that subject.
"We really need to do more to help people understand not only how their food is produced but how they can help eat healthily as well. There's far too much junk food which doesn't have much nutrition. Takeaways are not cheap. The cheapest food is the food you produce at home from basic ingredients. Prices have gone up quite a lot but basic ingredients are not too expensive.
"In our household food waste has virtually been eliminated and some of that is about portion size. I think catering sector have a lot to blame for that. A lot of hotels will now have a buffet for breakfast and at the end of the service a lot of that food gets thrown away, so food waste is an environmental crime when there's so many in the world starving and so many people in this country struggling to make ends meet.
"It's difficult to get into farming as farm land is very expensive to buy, tenancy is hard to come by but there are opportunities within the industry working in farm management. There's great opportunities working in the outdoors in some of our food processing sectors as well, so please any young people think about a career in agriculture or food production."