Promotion of sustainable eating habits through optimized school meals

Commitment to international agreements on sustainable development necessitates fundamental changes in human diets. By introducing children to environmentally sustainable and healthy school meals from an early age there is large potential to improve children’s knowledge of sustainable development and their diets in the short and long term. Given the huge influence of Swedish school meals on shaping children’s dietary habits and on procurement of food, we find exceptionally good preconditions to reduce environmental impact through school meals. Every school day 1.2 million lunches are served in primary school at an annual cost of 5.6 billion kr, a significant proportion of the total education budget.
The overall aim of this research project is to optimize school meals with regard to greenhouse gas emissions, nutritional content, and acceptability to children, at the lowest possible cost. We hypothesize that this will lead to higher consumption of nutritious lunches with a lower environmental impact, less waste and more efficient use of public resources.
In general, school meals are of high quality but our studies show there is room for improvement when it comes to certain nutrients, how the school meal is integrated with teaching, and how schools deal with issues of environmental impact. Many schools try to reduce the environmental impact on a “best guess” basis, but few try to reduce impacts systematically. Another aspect of efficiency is food waste. Swedish authorities have concluded that it is essential for recurrent food waste surveys to be carried out at different levels in the food chain with the aim of reducing food waste. In order to develop optimal food baskets suitable for the Swedish school context and to document improvement in all sustainability aspects, data on children’s current diet and food preferences are needed as well as knowledge on the impact of meal quality on consumption and waste. Optimizing public service meals from an environmental and nutritional
perspective, at lowest possible cost, while still acceptable to consumers could make public service meals an important lever for future sustainable development of the food sector in Sweden and abroad. High quality school meals are also a powerful way to facilitate more equal food intake among different groups in society, be it gender, socioeconomic or ethnic groups.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to develop a holistic optimization model for a health-promoting, affordable, and acceptable/palatable school meal plan, which is optimized for environmental sustainability (i.e. greenhouse gas emissions). Modelling all three aspects of sustainability of meals and development of sample menus for direct application in schools makes this project highly innovative and practice-relevant.

By the end of this project we will have achieved the following goals:

1. Assessment of dietary habits among a representative sample of Swedish school children, and in relation to school meal quality
2. Consumption and food waste at school is routine, facilitated by a new module in SkolmatSverige
3. A model for optimizing school meals for environmental impact, which takes nutritional content, cost, and acceptability into account.
4. A test of practical applicability of the optimized school meals with respect to students’ acceptability, consumption and waste.
5. A set of generalized guidelines for future sustainable school meals.

This project constitutes collaboration between three unique projects.
SkolmatSverige has been developed by our research group and currently reaches out to almost 40% of all primary schools. This tool assesses school meal quality in six domains. We additionally plan to estimate food waste at school and municipality level “Riksmaten ungdom” is a national dietary survey being carried out in a representative sample of Swedish children with new and validated methodology by the National Food Agency. A food basket optimization tool developed by Metropolitan University College, using linear programming, which
can simultaneously optimize meals for environmental impact, health and cost
The suggested menus will be tested in a municipality and improvements with regard to greenhouse gas emissions, nutritional content, and waste will be compared relative to baseline. By introducing children to sustainable school meals
from early age there is potential for fostering the concept of sustainability in future generations to the benefit of themselves and to society.

A project to optimize the composition of school meals so that they are accepted by Swedish school children, save 40 % of greenhouse gas emissions, are affordable and minimized for waste

... in progress