Year 8 Science Gallery Excursion

Recently, all Year 8 students participated in two hands-on workshops run by staff at the Science Gallery Melbourne – Future Food and Fire Practice. The excursion was a joint venture between Renaissance and Food Tech.

Here are a range of reflections on the excursion by students:

"The Science Gallery excursion was full of very interesting topics and workshops for us to participate in. One I found particularly captivating was the evolution of First Nations fire practices to mostly non-Cultural burns on this continent, and how the landscapes changed over the years because of both controlled and uncontrolled fires. As for what we should do differently in the future, there should be more cricket flour waffles out there for perhaps gluten free or curious people. It opens a lot more doors to how cricket waffles can evolve and grow to be just as popular as regular waffles".

"The most interesting thing was eating the bugs and seeing how disgusting they are. Even though they are very healthy I doubt that most people will eat them, even though they have a very flavourful and exquisite taste. The thing that surprised me during the day was the graph for the different fires – both Cultural and non-Cultural burns. The colours were all different for each of the different fires, signifying how different the damage to nature was, and the sheer amount of destruction that the post-colonisation fires caused was absolutely bonkers. In the future, we should start consuming more bugs because they have a lot of protein and important nutrients. Consuming bugs like this is a very good source of food that is easily found and is usually healthier than eating unhealthy processed food".

"I found it really interesting to learn about the different grains and insects used for food as well as learning about the tree readings from when there were loose bushfires and when the bushfires were controlled by First Nations peoples. I found that eating cricket and wattle seed waffles didn't taste as salty and crunchy as I expected; instead, they gave a different flavour to the waffles. I feel that society should do more Cultural burning around Australia, especially in the areas where bushfires are most common (like Australian forests). I feel this is SO important as it would save the animals, plants, insects and even homes from the danger of bushfires".

By various Year 8 students