Here you can find the ”Edueat’s Manifesto”. We kindly ask you to read with attention. If you share the values, please fill in the form attached below.
MANIFESTO FOR AN AWARE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN FAMILIES AND SCHOOL CONTEXTS
- Food is a right. Eating is a complex act and suitable nutrition is not only an individual responsibility but especially political and social. Children have to be aware of what they eat.
- Family and school work together to ensure a food education able to preserve personal, political, social, and cultural dimensions, supporting processes of growing awareness, knowing that the relationship with food starts from the first phases of human life and affects not only eating habits but the identity-building process itself.
- From a personal point of view, knowing the effects of food choices on health and using a sensory approach to tasting, based on the exercise of all perceptual skills (sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell), are the main topics of a healthy food education.
- From the cultural point of view, the direct relationship with local food producers and workers supports the knowledge of traditions and the place where we live, getting used to the product’s seasonality and location.
- From the political point of view, family, and school, supported by political and sanitary institutions, develop knowledge regarding the relationship between food and economy, with particular reference to the southern areas of the world and the relationship between food and poverty, food and malnutrition, food, and health, food and pollution.
- From the social point of view, teaching food culture based on discovery learning and a ludic approach, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary methodology, and Multiple Intelligences Theory may support children’s meaningful learning and socio-cognitive development. Food education needs specific teaching tools and educational activities that allow it to connect the academic curriculum to the theme of food.
- Public and private catering stakeholders such as restaurants, farms, school canteens, hospital canteens, etc., have to proactively promote effective dietary customs to preserve consumers’ health and environmental sustainability.
- The act of eating should be not set as an imposition, but as a free practice able to exercise own awareness and own ability to choose and decide.
- Eating requires a right time. Meal sharing at least once a day in the family is an important moment also for communicating and develop relationships.
- The WHO guidelines, aimed at supporting the use of fresh and natural foods and moderating the use of sugar and salt, should be promoted as dietary customs and concrete actions within families, schools, and society itself. Information only, slowed down by current customs and lifestyles, does not guarantee an effective acceptance of new habits in this field.