Green Agritainment
VET strategies for Edutainment in European Agritourism
VET strategies for Edutainment in European Agritourism
The Eurobarometer 535 – The EU Ecolabel released in September 2023 showed that in food decision making consumption, the 73% of consumers declares that the impact of food products on the environment is “important” or “rather important” and the 81% agree or strongly agree on the efficacy of purchasing food products with lower environmental impact on the environment can make the difference by showing sensitivity to environmental issues.
But despite efforts in promoting an increased awareness on healthy and sustainable food consumption, the recent Eurobarometer “Food Safety in EU” released by EFSA in March 2022 showed that average knowledge of food risk factor is decreased from 2019 to 2022 in the general population (from -3% to -7%). A decreased knowledge of technical aspects concerning sustainable food may disorient consumers in proper selection of healthy and sustainable food.
The EU Ecolabel, launched in 1992 in order to promote consumers sustainable decision in several areas including tourism through the initiative “EU Ecolabel tourist accommodation”, according to the Eurobarometer 535 is still unknown to the majority of EU citizens with the 62% of EU citizens that never seen the logo (IE = 80%, RO = 70%; BG = 70%; CY = 64% EL = 61%; IT = 51%).
It’s there a discrepancy between EU citizens interest in selecting sustainable food and tourism consumption and knowledge of processes concerning food and tourism sustainability aspects.
The Agritainment Project aims to promote an innovative model to reduce this knowledge gap through edutainment activities performed in agritourism which represent a model that agritourism businesses owners and workers can adopt to attract visitors and support them in understanding the value behind sustainable food and tourism accommodation services through the use of entertainment.
The use of humor in education is widely studied in scientific research and demonstrated its efficacy in promoting knowledge, attention, memory and critical thinking a wide variety of settings such as online learning (Erdoğdu, Ünal Çakıroğlu, 2021), for environmental education (Cook et al., 2022), environmental awareness and persuasion (Moyer-Gusé, Tchernev, Whitney Walther-Martin, 2019) universities (Henzel, Pair, 2020; Daumillier et al., 2020). Yeo et al. (2020) demonstrated also the positive effect of humor in technical information through social media.
The Agritainment project aims to promote the integration between sustainable food and tourism, sustainability related policies knowledge transmission to customers through humor and entertainment techniques and methods integrated in educational visits, educational marketing actions in agritourism for the promotion of pro-environmental behaviors and attitudes in visitors, increase
