Liberty High School’s FFA took a field trip on March 22 at 8 am to a competition at Laurel Ridge in Winchester where many other schools participated in competitions that were held there and even some middle and elementary schools attended. There was one competition in particular called Food Science where you had to take a food and aroma test. You had to figure out which aromas they had in the tubes and what cookie was different from the rest than on paper tests. There were about 20 kids in total from Liberty and some kids from other schools who had to compete in the same comp with 6 different steps.
The first step was a test you had to take with 20 multiple-choice questions about food science and you had an hour to complete it. The second step was the aroma smelling, where 7 glass tubes held different aromas and you had a sheet with 20 different aromas it could be and you had to smell each one and figure out the correct aroma. The third step was cookie tasting. They gave each kid three nilla cookies and one of them had something different about one, one was either off-brand or was put in water and you had to taste them and figure it out
The fourth step is the Apple juice tasting where they give you three mini cups to everyone filled with Apple juice that was labeled either 1, 2, or 3 and you have to tell the one that’s different out of the three cups it could have been watered down, off-brand or extra apple in the juice. The fifth step is the customer complaint where you had five complaints and you had to read each complaint and their reason and figure out what level of complaint it was from unsatisfactory to physical harm or safety. The final step was math. It was two questions about ounces and they had five minutes to complete it.
After the competitions were over they provided Chick-fil-A for lunch for everyone and gave medals to the kids who got first, second, and third places in each competition. No student from Liberty had won the top three in the food science competition but the scores were still very high and they had lots of fun. “I had a lot of fun and it was a cool experience doing the food science competition and I learned some new things. I will definitely be doing it again next year, as said by Junior Lucas Mecke.”
