There are so many food issues needed to be discussed… Within the We Eat Responsibly project, several Slovak Ecoschools have focused on the most crucial ones, for example on meat, palm oil, hard working conditions, and so on. During the project they have acknowledged, that before we buy and eat food, we should think about its impact on natural environment and other people.
School trips to local farms
Organizing trips to show students how their food is really being produced was probably one of the most popular teaching methods in Slovak Ecoschools. Thanks to that, students had the opportunity to meet local producers and ask them many crucial questions. Most of them were really curious about how the food production works and during these trips they got to know many important things. For example, the students could taste the food directly at the farm and compare these products with the ones from supermarkets, which are usually imported from foreign countries or full of pesticides. The flavour and quality was absolutely different.
During the excursions, farmers had the opportunity to share their life stories with the students and explain how does the transported food impact lives of people in foreign countries. Students found out that food can have huge social impact. It affects not only lives of the people in foreign countries, but also lives of the people living near to them. Despite higher quality of the food they produce, local farmers have to fight with large producers and their low prices.
Vegetarian cookbook
How do the animals we eat actually live? How are they treated? To discuss these questions, students of many Ecoschools organized trips to local animal farms – to get to know more about meat and its producers. They have found out many interesting facts, for example that meat has crucial environmental and ethical impact. These findings have motivated the students to go further and do something about this issue. The elementary school Železiarska in Košice collected about twenty vegetarian recipes and create a cookbook. It is a very useful one, because they managed to incorporate many ingredients into the recipes, that could potentially end up as food waste.
Milk is good for bones! Is it? And is it good for natural environment?
The elementary school of Zlaté Moravce have also focused on the (in countries like Slovakia de facto taboo) topic of today’s meat industry. The older students tried to explain to younger pupils that in general, meat production causes huge pollution, degrades the quality of soil, wastes a huge amount of water and very often is also connected to maltreatment and abuse of animals. The way we produce meat is simply not good and sustainable. The students have also prepared a noticeboard on which they informed the whole school about the production of eggs, ethical problems of milk or environmental impacts of meat.
Almost all your food contains one thing…
Another action team, from Elementary school Komenského from Spišská Nová Ves, was the most interested one in another important issue – palm oil. They prepared lectures and videos for younger pupils to explain the environmental and social impact of this tricky ingredient. They understood that palm oil is connected to burning forests, endangered animals and hard living conditions of people in foreign countries. After the lectures, pupils were given a homework – to bring all the sweets they like to eat. Then they meet again and read what these sweets contain. Palm oil was present in almost all of them.
To demonstrate these facts, students created a noticeboard with these sweets and another one with sweets that do not contain palm oil. The younger pupils then made several drawings to show what the negative impacts of palm oil production are. Their drawings were hanged next to the noticeboards.
So thanks to the We Eat Responsibly project, Ecoschool students started to think more critically about their food choices. Many of them even decided to change their own eating habits but also to influence their parents and friends to buy food more responsibly. They understood that their meals could be “not-so-innocent” as they usually think.
