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Diet for a Green Planet Handbook - Molétai

Edited on

31 March 2015
Read time: 2 minutes

The city of Molétai has also produced its own version of the Diet for a Green Planet Handbook. Here, project coordinator Loreta Štelbienė gives us an insight in the process.
 

Diet for a Green Planet Handbook - Molétai
Producing this handbook was an intense process, where the discussions leading to the final result were as interesting and important as the actual result. We have included people from our local support group in the process – civil servants, headmasters, chefs, dieticians and others – in order to deepen the understanding of the Diet for a Green Planet concept among important groups.

In our discussions we have had long discussions on ecology, usefulness and taste – what it means to have organic products, which local products we can offer in the school canteens, which kind of recipes we want to promote for a healthy and environmentally friendly lifestyle. The fact that the amount of meat and sugar must be reduced also triggered interesting discussions.
Loreta Štelbienė, Molétai's project coordinator in "Diet for a Green Planet".
In the end we agreed on the direction of the handbook. We will target mainly kitchen staff, public hygienic specialists, dieticians, headmasters, teachers and children in kindergartens and schools. These groups will be very important for the future transformation of food habits in our city. But we also need to focus on the decision-making institutions to accomplish a change. So, we will also distribute the handbook to relevant municipality council members and institutions.

We are proud to have made the handbook process very inclusive. We included the students of the gymnasium by using their photographs to illustrate seasons, into which the recipes are divided. And the recipes come from the kitchen staff in schools and kindergartens. There was a long list of recipes and the selection process was marked by animated discussions, where factors like taste, health, balance of meat and vegetables, seasonal availability and organic supply played important roles.

A part of pushing a transformation of the public meals here in Molétai is of course to empower the local suppliers. Therefore we wrote an article about them in the handbook. We want to increase the demand, but also the supply of food that can help saving seas from eutrophication and reduce climate change at large.     

All in all I am very pleased with the final result – and with the fact that there has been a great transfer of knowledge when it comes to the Diet for a Green Planet concept.

Download Molétai's locally adapted Diet for a Green Planet Handbook (pdf) here: