School vegetable gardening is becoming more popular with the increased emphasis on healthy eating both at home and in the educational system. It is important to get involved in growing as it gives a good understanding of where food comes from and is an exciting introduction to food supply chains.

We welcomed vocational training teachers and students and administration staff to tell us all about this concept.

Thanks to our chat with them, we learnt that a food supply chain is the process that all food products go through, from production all the way through to consumption. The food supply chain is a hugely important step in how you safely consume and undesrtand the food we eat.

There are certain key stages that appear in the food supply chain. The essential stages taking place in between farm and fork include: Production, handling and storage, processing and packaging, disdribution, retailing and consumption.

Once we had an understanding of what a food supply chain was, we began to understand its importance.

Back to our school vegetable garden, we harvested all the tomatoes as the first stage of the food supply chain. Then, we could eat these tomatoes straight from the garden to our plates, concept known as ZERO KM FOOD. In recent years, people have become more aware of the environmental impact that certain supply chains may be having and these tomatoes travelled zero kilometers; therefore the environment does not suffer from pollution.