Shanghai Food Fair

During the Fair on June 7, FoodHI hosted a large-scale food fair with Foodie to educate the public about its latest advances in promoting food safety around the globe. The fair had an array of multiple connected stations, designed such that visitors could enter from one end and exit from the other with an unprecedented understanding of the organizations’ many efforts in ensuring the safe production, transport, and serving of foods.

To the right-most end of the fair was a taste testing station, where visitors were to taste a small slice of either white, sourdough, or whole grain bread blindfolded and guess which one of the three types they had eaten. This introduced guests to the general gastronomic sensation of common dairy ingredients.

Next was the delicious cuisines station, where food samples of diverse origins, each containing 200 calories, were displayed (not for consumption). Visitors were quick to notice the differences in volume of each sample, which suggested the varying amounts of energy stored in manufactured food substances like corn syrup and flour.

Then was the App exhibition station, at which WHI members took turns introducing the organization’s newest breakthrough product Safeplate. With a ChatGPT plugin and frequent article updates from student writers, the App received much attention from guests despite being at only pilot stage at the time.

Last was the trivia games station, where fairgoers competed in live online games which tested their knowledge of food safety’s nuances, such as recognizing mold, cooking meat, and preserving special foods. The games proved to be a fun, memorable means of learning food safety precepts which would otherwise be intricate and confusing.

While it was underway, visitors were randomly asked to rate the food fair out of ten and were then interviewed on their opinions of the food fair. Almost all of the ratings were 10/10, and a vast majority of the interview results were highly positive. “Everything was pretty great,” one interviewee said, “I really appreciate the fair, and I learned a lot from it.”

Throughout its 4-hour duration, FoodHI and Foodie’s joint fair was visited by many hundreds of students, and all of them picked up at least some sort of new information involved with eating well at minimal risks. It was a major success considering the widespread instruction of a student populace, yet was also only a small first step in WHI’s global mission towards its targeted UN SDGs.