The School Feeding Circle seeks to ensure a healthy, safe, diverse and culturally appropriate nutrition, for 130 tzeltal and tsotsil children from Los Altos de Chiapas, seeking the effective exercise of the human and universal right to food. Based on the concept and practice of the food sovereignty, community is organized to carry out a scheme of production, gathering and preparation of food that is served in schools: the Good Eating Festivals, ensuring an adequate nutrition for children.
Chiapas is the Mexican state with the highest levels of poverty and malnutrition, with towns with over 50% of their population with food deficiency and over 80% of children living in homes with malnutrition prevalence. The feeding processes of indigenous communities have been drastically modified in recent years. The entry of highly industrialized foods and beverages has modified consumption and eating habits, causing nutritional disorders, mainly in childhood.
The Good Eating Festivals are a day on a school dining room in which children eat healthy, nutritional and locally produced food. This food is bought to local farmers, at a fair Price, and cooked by the women of the community. To have the expected impact, this initiative emphasize the implications of a healthy, sufficient, safe, local and culturally appropriate diet. For this, the Good Eating Festivals, are based on menus that meet these criteria.
The malnutrition of girls and boys is confronted with collaborative and community actions, which seek to modify the general environment in which children develop, promoting integral interventions in accordance with the socio-economic and cultural context of the municipalities in which we work. This initiative generates, from local resources, a new governance for the feeding of girls and boys in the School Centers of the communities, putting the right to food in the hands of local producers.
