Family and Consumer Sciences

The Cultivate Idaho initiative seeks to identify new strategies to create prosperity and food security where community members live, work, learn, play and grow older.

Private and public efforts must collaborate to assess community strengths and challenges as well as engage community members to plan and implement local solutions that promote healthy independence.

Contact Joey Peutz for more information.

Eat Smart Idaho is a UI Extension education program designed to help limited-resource adults learn how to stretch their food dollars to provide tasty, low-cost, healthy meals for their families. Eat Smart Idaho teaches nutrition and consumer-related skills that lead to individual change.

Children can also pick up on their parents’ attitudes about food. As role models, parents need to make sure they’re demonstrating a healthy attitude toward food so their children do, too.

Explore these helpful parent tips:

• Fruits and your health (pdf)
• Vegetables and your health (pdf)
• Fitting in physical activity (pdf)
• Grains (pdf)
• MyPlate (pdf)

These brochures offer useful facts on vegetables found in the typical Idaho garden. Each brochure includes a recipe, how to use and/or cook that vegetable, variety types (if applicable), how to store the vegetable and how to preserve the vegetable.

Explore these informative brochures:

• Onions are awesome! (pdf)
• Dry peas, beans and lentils (pdf)
• Colorful carrots (pdf)
• The versatile potato (pdf)
• Simply squash (pdf)

Contact Rebecca Luna at rebeccal@uidaho.edu to learn more.

UI Extension provides presentations on proper handwashing to ensure clean hands and healthy people. Germ City is a traveling exhibit created to promote handwashing.

Contact Joey Peutz to request a presentation.

UI Extension offers the Master Food Safety Advisor program (Master Food Preserver) to teach individuals how to safely preserve a variety of food products. Participants learn how to produce high quality preserved foods. After completion of the coursework, participants contribute 30 hours of volunteer service to provide reliable, research-based food preservation information to others in their community.

Anyone with an interest in food preservation and food safety can apply for the Master Food Safety Advisor program. Individuals with little or no previous food preservation experience are welcome. Persons must be interested not only in improving their own knowledge and skills, but must also be willing to share their knowledge with others.

A limited number of applicants are accepted each year on a first come, first served basis.

Cost and location

A $140 fee covers the cost of a binder, reference materials, food and supplies used in class. The binder and reference materials become part of your personal library.

If participants are unable to participate in 30 hours of volunteer service, they will be charged an additional $250. Do not send the fee until you have been notified of acceptance.

The course is offered through UI Extension, Ada County. The classes will start mid-April and will run through the end of May.

Training

Phase one: 30 hours of classroom instruction. Extension educators and advanced food safety advisors teach classes. Each session includes demonstrations, lectures and a hands-on preservation lab where you will make preserved foods. Homework, readings and learning checks are used each week.

Phase two: 30 hours of hands-on food preservation community service.

Topics include:

• Food safety
• Canning acid foods (fruits, tomatoes)
• Canning low acid foods (meats, vegetables)
• Making jams, jellies and preserves
• Pickling
• Dehydration
• Freezing

*You may choose to complete only phase one for an additional $250 ($390 total). Preference will be given to individuals completing both phases.

Commitment

Participants are required to attend each class and complete 30 hours of volunteer service in their community.

Service opportunities include answering telephone calls, assisting with and/or teaching classes, staffing booths and making displays. The Extension educator will help you decide how to best use your talents as a volunteer.

Certification

After 30 hours of course work and 30 hours of volunteer service are completed, the participant is certified as an Idaho Master Food Safety Advisor (Master Food Preserver).

UI Extension offers Preserve@Home, a web based food preservation course designed to teach individuals how to preserve a variety of food products. Participants learn how to produce high quality preserved foods and the science behind food preservation and food safety.

• Registration and class syllabus: contact Laura Sant at lsant@uidaho.edu or 208-852-1097
• Cost: $35 plus the cost of required UI Extension bulletins

Online Experience

Classroom instruction is delivered online through eXtension, monitored and facilitated by UI Extension educators. Each lesson includes online text that can be downloaded and printed, an online bulletin board (Forum) to facilitate student discussion, a real-time chat to interact with classmates, streamed videos and quizzes to assess student knowledge.

Required Lessons

• Causes of Foodborne Illness and Prevention
• Basis of Spoilage and Canning Basics
• Canning Acid Food (fruits and tomatoes)
• Canning Low Acid Foods (vegetables, meats and fish)
• Canning Specialty Foods (jams, jellies, preserves, salsas and pickled and fermented foods)
• Drying and Freezing

A final exam is given at the conclusion of the course, with a certificate of participation awarded to students scoring a 70 percent score or better. For more information, please contact Joey Peutz at joeyp@uidaho.edu or 208-642-6022.

The Ready, Set, Food Safe curriculum with nine lessons to teach food safety to high school students, as it applies to Idaho food service settings. Youth learn about food hazards, potentially hazardous foods, appropriate times and temperatures and much more. Participants are eligible to take an exam and receive Idaho’s Safe Food Handler Certification.

• To learn more about Ready, Set, Food Safe, contact Jang Ho Kim at 208-885-6972 or janghok@uidaho.edu
• To request a guest speaker, contact Joey Peutz at 208-642-6022 or joeyp@uidaho.edu