We aim to promote a healthier, more sustainable diet for the children and staff at a local elementary school by teaching children and staff in a playful way to re-discover natural, nutritious foods in our "Adventure of Flavors." We hope that the children, cooks, and teachers will grow to value regional foods that grow abundantly in their community and local ecosystem - the Atlantic Forest - by building a garden and learning new recipes for the school kitchen that use healthy, regional foods.
Child obesity is considered an epidemic in Brazil with one third of children overweight and 90% not consuming enough fruits or vegetables on a daily basis. Despite the abundance of nutritious natural foods that can be grown in Brazil, ultra-processed and industrialized food has taken over the daily diet of Brazil. Families have given up consuming traditional dishes made with natural foods and transitioned to a diet of ultra-processed foods of low nutritional value and high in sugar, fat & salt.
The project is a fun and didactic journey for children, teachers and cooks to reflect about their food choices and come up with solutions. The journey has 3 stages. The 1st is made up of missions where the kids discover where their food comes from through visits to the supermarket and the gardens of SINAL . The 2nd is the Lab, in which they build a garden and come up with healthy recipes together. The 3rd is when the children celebrate and share their journey with the community with a festival
The school director and several teachers are very open and excited to the possibility of making their school more sustainable and improving the food. However, they need a jump start to empower their staff to lead and maintain sustainability projects in the long term and to engage the students in this initiative. We hope that this first project, Aventura dos Sabores, will catalyze a larger and longer term change in the school, in which healthy eating and local food production are at the center.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
