Food is essential for good performance, but much of the food in schools today may hinder children’s ability to learn. Many menu items are high in sugar, sodium, and caffeine, leaving kids unfocused, anxious, and sick. This affects not only their performance but also their mood. Schools play a key role in creating lifelong healthy eating habits. Serving healthy, nutritious food helps children stabilize energy, boost their minds, and become better learners.
What can you do to promote nutritious food at schools?
Kids rather than eating healthy food, they love to eat more of junk food like pizza, burger, fried chips, sweets that are typically high in fat, sugar and salt which trigger pleasure centers in their brains, stimulating them to keep eating. FSSAI has released regulations titled Food Safety and Standards (Safe food and balanced diets for children in school) Regulations, 2020 to help control this menace. One of the important regulations proposed within this is that, food high with saturated fat or trans-fat or added sugar or sodium cannot be sold in school campus or to school children in an area within 50 m from the school gate in any direction.
Kids grasp better eating habits when schools provide healthy food. Hence, schools can include milk, yogurt, oatmeal, whole grains, nuts, fruits and vegetables that provide key nutrients in their meals by disguising the appearance and taste of these healthy food.
Making Nutrition education a part of the curriculum and organizing fun-filled activities like identifying pictures of different fruits and vegetables, growing vegetables at school, learning about cultural food traditions will make the kids opt for healthy food.
According to HRD Ministry officials, the Business Standard journal reported on July 14, 2019, that over 900 children across the country fell ill in the past three years after consuming mid-day meals. These incidents highlight the need to ensure that the food served to children is not only nutritious but also safe. To achieve this, school staff must prioritize hygiene and safe food handling, taking extra care at every step. School kitchens and cafeterias must maintain high food safety standards to prevent cases of food poisoning.
What is Safe and Nutritious Food (SNF) at schools all about?
The Eat Right School program, an initiative of FSSAI was launched in September 2016 as Safe and Nutritious Food (SNF) at School. The objective is to create awareness about ‘Eating Healthy’, ‘Eating Safe’, and ‘Eating Sustainably’ among school children and through them in the community at large. Pawan Agarwal, the former CEO, FSSAI said, “Students are the most susceptible to food-borne diseases and due to lack of awareness, they are open to experimenting with different kinds of food (mostly unhealthy) while at school. The objective of FSSAI’s Eat Right School (SNF@School) program is to create continuous engagement with students, teachers and parents to make them aware about the importance of safe food, healthy and sustainable diets”.
Want to get your school certified as Eat Right School? Here’s what you need to know
- Any recognized school can register for the Eat Right School program providing general information.
- The schools will have to nominate Health and Wellness Coordinators (HWC’s) who will have to be trained and certified through an online certification program.
- The HWC’s will carry the message of safe and nutritious food in school through both curricular and co-curricular activities.
- The school will have to undergo certain monitoring and evaluation procedures, after which the school will get certified as Eat Right School.
A lot of schools have sessions around nutrition and healthy eating, but there needs to be an integrated approach to make this holistic. That is what FSSAI aims to do as part of Eat Right School initiative. While it should be easy to implement this, if you still need detailed information on getting your schools certified as Eat Right School, you can write to us at eatrightschool@foodsafetyworks.in