Classroom potato - Project can be a real winner

ONCE upon a time it would have been like sending coals to Newcastle but as a handy ready reckoner of social change goes it’s about as good as you’ll get.

More than 220,000 schoolchildren will be introduced to the charms and challenges of growing potatoes, that saviour and destroyer of the Irish people.

In a thoroughly commendable classroom initiative organisers Agri Aware hope that pupils will have an opportunity to learn about the nutritional, historical and cultural significance of spuds in Ireland.

It is intended that the schoolchildren will also learn how they are grown and cooked. In other words a win-win project for all involved.

It is an opportunity to learn about our past through the one crop that sustained us and shaped so much of our history and that of countries to which so many Irish people emigrated in earlier centuries.

It is an opportunity to teach children about the relationship between agriculture and the food on our tables and, through this, re-emphasise the linkage between good husbandry and a respect for the land and the quality of the food we eat.

A lot of these important relationships have been forgotten or just put to one side as we become ever-more dependent on industrialised food.

Anything that will bring that relationship, that responsibility, back to the centre of our thoughts is to be encouraged.