The Forum, Norwich on 18th – 26th October 2019

Public engagement of our science is very important, which is why we love to spend time communicating the many uses of our Food Composition data, via lectures and games.

This week Hannah and Jenny represented Food Databanks at the Norwich Research Park day at Norwich Science Festival in The Forum, Norwich. The whole of Quadram Institute Bioscience (QIB) was represented, providing science fun and informative activities on food, health and the microbiome.

We took along two of our new games, created using the data we have compiled for the UK composition of Foods dataset:

Play Your Carbs Right” our interpretation of the old TV game show, in our game, ‘contestants’ have six random food cards and must use their nutrition knowledge to guess whether each food has higher or lower carbohydrate composition than the previous card. Unfortunately for our winners, the prize was a food shaped rubber, not a car, but they seemed happy with that!

“Food Composition Top Trumps” using the rules of the commonly played game, children enjoyed trying to win their opponents cards based on their knowledge of portion size, fat, sugar, calcium and vitamin C content in foods, which included banana, baked beans and bacon.

An exhausting, but highly fun day. We met loads of fantastic people of all ages. Thank you for playing along and being so interested in finding out about what we do in Food Databanks and QIB.