Garlic in the Classroom: You've Come A Long Way since 1928!

 Toronto Garlic Festival has created the Ontario Garlic in the Classroom lesson plan. Starting with Autumn planting this versatile guide takes students on the garlic growing journey through the school year. It incorporates modules in Math, Science, Humanities and Language Arts and is suitable for grades 3-5 but is easily adapted for other grades. Garlic is a forgiving plant offering great rewards.

Created with help from teacher/farmer Shawn Stevens, the Ontario Garlic in the Classroom Student Lesson Plan will engage your students on many levels:

• It brings them closer to the soil

• It helps them gain a better understanding of where food comes from

• It gives them an opportunity to participate in a team activity

• It helps them understand their connection to other cultures through garlic

• It channels their new-found interest in Ontario garlic into an interest in cooking and diet

Ontario Garlic in the Classroom Student Guide and Teacher’s Guide are available to download for free on Toronto Star’s Classroom Connection.

This Garlic Growing handbook is a step forward from 1928, when a meeting of the trustees and teachers for a school near Sudbury debated whether students who smelled of garlic could be admitted to class. “The question of whether or not we could send pupils home if they ate garlic, arose. It was decided that we could."

Soil is not be the carbon sequestration saviour we thought It was

According to this article from Quanta Magazine... "a new generation of soil studies powered by modern microscopes and imaging technologies has revealed that whatever humus is, it is not the long-lasting substance scientists believed it to be. 'There are a lot of people who are interested in sequestration who haven’t caught up yet,' said Margaret Torn, a soil scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-soil-science-revolution-upends-plans-to-fight-climate-change-20210727/

A lesson from General Motors vs Ford

 

A business marketing story to help us think about the challenge of attracting certain parts of the market for our new e-com store, is Alfred Sloan's classic, "My Years at General Motors."

Until the 1920’s Henry Ford dominated the automobile market with his factory produced cars and low price. He could build cars cheaper than his competitors and he dominated the market based on price by building just one model: The Model T. Car buyers back then saw the automobile as just a form of transportation, nothing more. Cars as a commodity. So they were happy to own Ford Model T.

GM challenged this paradigm and grew to be one of the dominant automobile makers in the world. How did they do this? One of their weapons was through product segmentation and in understanding their market. They changed the public’s perception of the automobile from just a means of getting around to being a symbol of status and luxury. They created several models, from the low priced Chevrolet to the high priced Cadillac, each targeted to a different market segment. Thanks in part to their product and marketing strategy GM eventually surpassed Ford Motor Company.

This is not a perfect comparison, but to look at garlic in context of Ford vs General Motors gives a sense of the challenge. For us, the equivalent of Ford is cheap imported garlic. Many consumers see garlic as a commodity, sure it’s a desirable flavour in their food, but it’s seen as one dimensional, sharp and strong. They wouldn’t consider paying more than $2 or $3 per pound. They were like the early buyers of the Model T. Our challenge is the same challenge that General Motors had over 100 years ago: How to make Ontario garlic and the products made with it, attractive to the segment of the population that sees garlic as a commodity, an essential ingredient maybe, but not worth more than the price paid for imported garlic.