We saw a group of children who were eating in one of our dining rooms. And there was more bread left over than there were students in the lunchroom. They were only eating the centre part of the slice of bread. So then we thought that we had to do something.
While a large part of the world’s population has to live with scarce resources, at home we throw away a lot of food that could be taken
advantage of.
Throwing food away, besides wasting the natural, technical, and human resources necessary for its production, also means generating waste, as well as its impact and the additional costs involved in waste disposal. So when it comes to preventing waste, we are talking about much more than taking full advantage of food. We’re talking about a responsible, critical attitude towards consumption and an effort to reduce the amount of waste we produce.
We understand time in school lunchrooms to be an educational opportunity to acquire healthy eating habits and social skills. We have the opportunity to raise the awareness of future generations regarding sustainable models. So we saw the opportunity of setting up the Weigh and Think project as a tool for developing a critical awareness of food consumption and a proactive attitude towards reducing food waste and waste production in general.
The experience in the food reuse field is the starting point to generate an educative programme aimed at children and teenagers in 2012.
Once the pedagogic file was developed and the steps to carry out the Weight and Think Project in school canteens were defined, we implement the fist pilot test. We develop it at the beginnings of 2013 and from the second month and in a sustained way, we achieve a reduction of the 35% in the food waste.
Among the thirty schools which have been developing the project in a continued way from its beginnings, the decrease in the waste of food is already established around the 70%.
