SDG 2 - End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture

Find the most recent Gazette stories for this goal here.

Teaching and Learning:

• Project Food for Thought NL is a mobile food bank based in St. John's working to combat food insecurity by providing essential food items to those facing financial, social, accessibility or transit-based barriers. In 2020, Food for Thought NL worked with Memorial’s Division of Co-operative Education to provide work terms for engineering and business students.
• Asia Holloway, a graduate student in the Faculty of Medicine's Master of Public Health program, discussed how food retail environments can influence food choices in 2019. They highlighted the use of strategic marketing and product layout to promote unhealthy foods, and the important role that health inspectors could play in improving Canadian food retail environments.
• Working in collaboration with Acadia University, Memorial Diatetics Program is concerned with diet and its effects on health, especially with the practical application of a scientific understanding of nutrition. The science of nutrition helps people to make healthy food choices and separate fact from fiction about food.
  
• The Department of Biochemistry offers programs that include a B.Sc. with a Major in Nutrition, a B.Sc..(Hons.) in Nutrition, and graduate programs where students can focus on Nutrition and Food Science. The programs encompass various frontiers in nutrition including the fundamentals of human nutrition, food engineering, nutritional intervention in chronic human disease, and diet-gene interaction to further understanding of the potential to design personalized diets for better health.

Research: 

• Marine Institute's Food Processing Pilot Plant is a provincially registered facility available for the testing of new food processing equipment and technologies, the devlopment of new products and processes for fish and seafood products, and the training of processing personnel. 
• The Functional Foods Sensory Laboratory on Grenfell Campus, and the Navigate Entepreneurship Centre, a partnership of Grenfell Campus and College of North Atlantic, recieved funding in 2021 to increase the province's food processing capacity, expand the functional food's research program, and support local entepreneurial activities. 
• The Department of Biochemistry engages in research that focuses on Nutrition and Food Science. This includes how early nutrition can permanently change metabolism, the role of nutrition during intestinal injury, the nutritional basis for prevention of cardiovascular disease, obesity and diabetes, and how/why certain foods, dietary patterns, and lifestyle choices promote health while others promote disease development.

Public Engagement:

• In 2019, MUN acquired an 85-acre farm in Labrador and established the Pye Centre for Northern Boreal Food Systems to support northern agricultural research, education, and food security through collaboration with local farmers and organizations.
• Dr. Sarah Martin, an associate professor with Memorial’s Department of Political Science, was the 2020 recipient of the Terra Nova Young Innovator Award valued at $50,000. In collaboration with Food First NL, Dr. Martin’s project served to increase the capacity for the organization and highlighted local knowledge through a partnership between academia and the wider community.