April 21st to 26th 2022

The project

The main objective of this activity consists of changing the dietary habits of a target group towards diets that are more healthy and sustainable. This endeavour will have to be mindful to the different local realities of every school. This activity will contribute to meeting the SDG 3: good health and wellbeing and SDG 13: climate action.

This activity is relevant as our global food system (including raising animals, growing crops, deforestation to clear land for crops as well as the transportation and packaging of food) accounts for 37% of the global greenhouse gas emissions, while, at the same time, poor nutrition can contribute to the risk of developing health problems. In this rapidly changing world, eating has become key to the sustainability of both National Health Systems and the health of our planet.

It involved an initial phase in which students had to:

• be able to analyze the food system as a complex entity influenced by multiple factors.

• use scientific knowledge to know what a healthy and sustainable looks like and analyze their own and other people’s diets.

After the initial phase is completed, students had to research about the dietary habits of a target group. They had to use the scientific method, ICT tools and elementary statistics. The results were a scientific report with the conclusions of the research and proposals for intervention to the target group to achieve a more healthy and sustainable diet. Every school developed different proposals for intervention adapted to their local realities and the chosen target group. These could range from a campaign to raise awareness, the development of apps to calculate the carbon footprint of our diets, to reduce food waste, or from setting up a network of local shops that sell local and healthy food (via website, a quality stamp, ect), production of food in vegetable gardens or any other action determined by the results and process of research in every school. Ideally the target group was part of the research process from the beginning, setting the objectives of the research.

Involving the target group from the beggining of the reseach process make it more likely to adopt the dietary recommendations that will result from the research process. This is the basis of a methodology known as participatory action research.

All this work was carried out before the mobility. During the mobility the results were shared and analyzed amongst the different participants of every school.

Multiplier event in Alcorcón. Sustainable dinner for the educational community: parents, teachers, Erasmus+ students: