The Impact of Sustainability focused Cooking Workshops on Dalhousie Students

Abstract

Earth is experiencing a great climate change event caused mainly by human actions. One of the main sources contributing to our greenhouse gas emissions in Canada is agriculture. Agriculture accounts for 10% of Canada’s emissions through excessive fertilizer use, fossil fuel use, and methane released by livestock (Government of Canada, 2023). Our study sought to educate students on their dietary environmental impacts and grocery shopping choices so that they could lead more sustainable lives. Understanding the effects of your impacts and how you can reduce them is the first step to creating change. Two separate workshops were held at the Loaded Ladle kitchen, where students were told about how they could reduce their environmental impacts through their diet choices while they cooked a meal. Two surveys were done in addition to these workshops, one before the workshop and one a week following the workshop. The key findings of our study were that the sustainable cooking workshops had a statistically significant positive effect on the students' eating and grocery shopping habits. Although some results showed a negative change, the students’ overall sustainability scores increased following the workshop. To better understand if these findings would apply to the student population at large, we believe another study should be done with a larger sample size. Educating students on the environmental impacts of their food choices is an easy but important step in reducing our future impacts.