Healthy & sustainable food pathways for school children

Back to school means back to school lunches and snacks, and “for school children and adolescents, healthy diets are essential to grow, develop and be protected from disease,” says the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

“Worldwide 149 million children under five are too small for their age and 40 million are overweight. Millions also suffer from deficiencies of key nutrients.” The FAO states in a Class in Session interactive page on their website.

These nutritional problems can carry over into school age, impacting a child’s capacity to learn and their overall development. This highlights the importance of forming long-term healthy eating habits which means access to nutritious foods and positive influences from parents and caregivers.

Learning about how food systems work, how to make changes and develop skills to improve diets is also important, as is the food available at schools.

School gardens and learning where food comes from is vital so that children can watch food grow, harvest it and learn how to take care of the earth.

Food education, together with a healthy food environment can foster healthy habits in children and adolescents.

The FAO has developed a School Food and Nutrition Framework:

• Promoting healthy food environments and school food
• Stimulating inclusive procurement and value chains for school food including accessing food from local farmers and growers
• Integrating effective food and nutrition education in schools, and
• Creating an enabling political, legal, financial and institutional environment that allows for the co-ordination of various sectors involved.

This is a positive sign for an industry that is already undergoing a technology evolution which will transform food and farming practices with scalable digital technology. The Yield is leading the way in the horticulture and the specialty crop space find out more about our solution click here.