TOTAL PROJECT COST  – €10,180

IN PROGRESS

• Organisation Applying for Funding: Justicia Alimentaria
• Project Duration: 11 months – September 2024 – August 2025
• Area of Interest: Land – Local Produce
• Other organisations involved: APAEM (Associació de Producció Agrària Ecològica de Menorca): an association that promotes organic agriculture and its products on the island of Menorca. The entity also manages the seed bank of local varieties. APAEM will be involved in advising and promoting school gardens in children’s schools and in the preparation of a guide to promote biodiversity in playgrounds. And Marga Bonet, a professional nutritionist and dietician who will run workshops on healthy and sustainable dinners with families.

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THE PROJECT 

Summary of the project

This project aims to contribute to the transition towards a healthy, fair and sustainable food model in early childhood education centres in Menorca, by accompanying the educational community (educators, families and pupils). The dynamization of the school garden as an educational tool will allow working around seasonal production, with agro-ecological criteria, the knowledge of local varieties or the recovery of gastronomic knowledge. The work in the centre will be complemented with actions aimed at families to achieve greater coherence and, at the same time, contribute to generating changes in eating habits.

Environmental or Conservation Issue

The current food system is based on large-scale, energy-intensive agro-industrial food production, with globalised distribution and delocalised consumption, mostly based on processed products. This model exacerbates major global challenges and generates social, economic and environmental inequalities, both globally and locally. It is necessary to make changes in eating habits which, in recent decades, have been overwhelmed by processed products, which are kilometric and very unhealthy, both for people and for the planet.

Project Details

Context and justification

FAO’s Strategic Framework 2022-2031 was launched on 26 April 2021, which aims to support the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development through the transition to more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable food systems, with the objective of achieving better production, better nutrition, better environment and better lives, leaving no one behind. The ‘4 Improvements’ represent an organising principle for how FAO intends to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular SDG1 (End Poverty), SDG2 (Zero Hunger) and SDG10 (Reducing Inequalities). These principles are shared by Food Justice and the project is based on this strategy.

The current food system is based on large-scale agro-industrial food production, which demands a lot of energy from natural resources and chemicals, with globalised distribution and delocalised consumption, based mostly on processed products. This model exacerbates major global challenges and generates social, economic and environmental inequalities, both globally and locally.

Environmental sustainability is one of the three axes of Sustainable Development, and the Right to Food cannot be understood without promoting sustainable production based on agroecology and responsible consumption or without denouncing the impacts of industrial agriculture. Our food patterns based on the consumption of globalised food – produced in an intensive and industrialised way, excessively processed and consumed far from the area of production, through long distance food chains. This type of consumption generates environmental impacts such as long-distance food trade or the high energy demand of intensive production systems and the costs involved, generating a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions or other environmental implications. In a context of climate change and accelerated biodiversity loss, food production and distribution must necessarily entail a drastic reduction of the current environmental impact. For this reason, it is necessary to raise public awareness of the environmental consequences of the agro-industrial food production system and to offer alternatives for local production and marketing, based on seasonal products and recovering the food heritage around local varieties and culinary culture.

Intervention

Justicia Alimentaria has been working with educators and families in Menorca’s nursery schools since 2021, facilitating the introduction of content on healthy and sustainable food through resources adapted to the educational stage. As a result of this initiative and taking into account the lessons learned and the needs expressed, the project presented here has been focused.

We believe that education is a key tool to rebalance inequalities and to generate sustainable attitudes and behaviours in people. We understand that transformative education requires a global-local approach and innovative educational methodologies that generate critical knowledge on issues such as the fight against poverty, social justice, the achievement of the right to food or sustainable development. However, education is not only carried out in schools; we believe that the home is the true space for children’s education, and that it must be complemented by the work carried out in educational centres. Unifying these two educational processes will allow for greater coherence and progress towards a more committed society.

The project presented here will be developed in three lines of action. The first is aimed at educators and support staff at 10 nursery schools in Menorca to accompany them in the introduction of more resources on food sovereignty in the field of early childhood education. Activities are proposed to be carried out with the pupils, but also actions to improve the different food areas of the centre (snacks, dining room, parties, …). The second line of action aims to make the school garden of 7 nursery schools more dynamic, as a space for experimentation in which we can tackle a variety of contents aimed at developing the pupils’ skills and values in relation to healthy and sustainable food. One of the resources to be developed will be a guide to promote biodiversity in school playgrounds. The third line of action is aimed at the families of the 10 nursery schools, to raise awareness and provide tools and resources for acquiring good eating habits in the family environment. In this sense, practical workshops on healthy and sustainable dinners will be held, which are very well received by the families.

The project is planned to prioritise participatory and socio-affective methodologies that connect with the needs and interests of the participants and promote the will for transformation. For this reason, the proposed actions are designed to develop critical thinking about the current food system, empathy and a feeling of correspondence with other people and groups linked to more responsible and fairer food production and marketing models for society, and the ability to argue and mediate with other agents in the local food cycle.

In short, accompanying the educational community in the infant stage aims to contribute to generating critical awareness of the way we eat and to offer tools and resources for acquiring healthy and sustainable eating habits, both at school and in the family environment. The actions proposed are intended to have an impact on 10 nursery schools, more than 400 children and more than 150 families during this academic year, although the resources will remain in the centres for the following years.