Output Title: The Learn4Earth Recipe Collection
Output Type: Learning / teaching / training material – Manual / handbook / guidance material
Start Date: 2020-11-01
End Date: 2023-05-31
Activity Leading Organisation: Fundació Escoles Garbí
Description: The motivation behind The Learn4Earth Recipe Collection is the combination of children’s increasing disconnectedness from food and the climate problems the world is currently facing. In the globalised world where the possibilities of food are constantly growing, children have difficulties identifying different foods, which affects their health and well-being (Carlsen 2011). At the same time, global warming is a world problem that needs new and innovative solutions to overcome the current issues connected to the increasing CO2 and CH4 emissions (Nasa 2020) (NRDC 2016) (UN 2019). In recent years, the increasingly globalized food markets have caused changes to supply and demand, and we are now able to buy strawberries all year around from across the globe, thereby circumventing issues of seasonality, but also increasing transportation.
The Learn4Earth Recipe Collection IO will develop a new, innovative Recipe E-booklet that will provide pupils with innovative tools to engage with food and become informed food consumers, creating awareness of food sustainability and impact of food on climate change. It is the ambition that new hands-on activities will empower the pupils to new thinking and knowledge sharing peer to peer, but also from pupil to teachers through didactic methods of equality and level of eye approaches (Him & Hippe 2009). It is the hypothesis that pupils think differently than adults and that the pupils will generate knowledge that can change the adults thinking and perception of the environment, creating a behaviour change.
To support the sustainability element of the curriculum, cooking subjects as home economics, the Learn4Earth Recipe Collection IO will develop yet another element of innovation, namely a guide to support schools, to ensure that their cooking lessons and extra-curricular cooking is more sustainable, climate-friendly and healthy.
The guide will involve questions as to how to plan sustainable, climate-friendly recipe ideas across the year, for each year group, considering seasonality, purchasing, waste and storage, cooking and growing ingredients for cooking classes. This will provide the teachers with the ability to make informed choices about which recipes to choose, when to use them during the year, and how to obtain the ingredients for the lessons. Further, it will provide the pupils with new knowledge and awareness of food and its environmental, sustainable and health-related effects.
Moreover, the Learn4Earth Recipe Collection IO will develop new elements of innovation within food literacy; this will be implemented through new hands-on food activities and the tools and skills from the understanding, developing and implementation of the guide and recipes to the Learn4Earth Recipe Collection. Further, it is the aim that this new knowledge,
will impact the pupils with empowerment and new action competencies to act in a more sustainable and climate-friendly direction as current and future consumers and citizens. Therefore, the Learn4Earth Recipe Collection IO will seek to develop different forums to motivate discussions concerning the Climate, Environment and food and develop actions to improve this, focusing on reducing greenhouse gasses and the carbon footprint. It is the belief that creating awareness and educating pupils in Climate, Environment and Food issues will ensure more informed discussions, broaden the knowledge and increase action competencies and empower pupils, securing the transferability of the Learn4Earth project and the overall aim of reducing CO2 emissions through behaviour changes and more sustainable consumerism now and in the future.