Growing green habits: Students shape a school program to reduce food waste and eat healthily

Australian households throw away one in five bags of food they buy. Sending food to landfill produces potent greenhouse gases and contributes 8-10% of global emissions.

Food waste not only impacts the planet, but also our hip pockets. It can cost households up to $2500 per year, representing a significant chunk of their food budget.

Healthy and sustainable diets that minimise food waste are vital to reducing our impact on the environment. There are many suggestions on how to eat healthy and sustainably – eat seasonally, buy locally-grown food, avoid overeating, reduce the amount of animal products eaten, limit processed foods, and increase the amount of plant-based whole foods consumed.

To help reduce future food waste and promote a sustainable food system, working with young people is a crucial piece of the puzzle.

Young people can be key influencers of change within their household, encouraging others to adopt healthy and sustainable behaviours, and providing an opportunity to create widespread change.

Schools are an ideal setting for young people to learn about food waste, and gain the information and skills to reduce food waste and contribute to a healthy and sustainable future.

What we did

Eva Jenkins, a PhD candidate in the Monash Digital Nutrition Lab, and the team engaged with Year 8 students in the co-design process to create their own strategy to address food waste, and ensure the solutions created for food waste reduction were relevant to them.

Re-licious was an eight-week program designed with the students that aimed to teach students the skills needed to use the leftover ingredients in their household to create nutritious and sustainable recipes.

During the program students developed recipes based on leftover ingredients. They learnt about healthy eating, tips to reduce food waste, and how to throw together a combination of ingredients that might otherwise be wasted.

Developing nutritious and sustainable recipes

The Re-licious intervention successfully increased students’ ability to create a meal from limited ingredients. Students had a higher intention to reduce food waste after Re-licious, and felt guiltier when wasting food. After the program, students had higher interest and motivation in health and healthy eating.

Key factors that students found important when creating recipes included the time taken to prepare the recipe, the difficulty level, accessibility of ingredients and appliances, the allergens in the recipe, the healthiness and sustainability of the recipe, and the cost per serving.

There were 23 recipes submitted to be included in the recipe eBook, each designed by the students to address these key criteria.

Students aimed to include fruits or vegetables in each recipe (if their leftover ingredients permitted), and be considerate of the environmental impact of the ingredients. All recipes include a range of food groups and have been assessed for their nutritional value, with each recipe’s nutrition information panel included in the eBook.

Some standout recipes include tuna sushi sandwiches, mochi, yoghurt pancakes, and peanut-mellow crisp.

Discussions with the students highlighted that they enjoyed the change from regular classes, and wanted to learn about nutrition, food waste and sustainability at school. The students had not yet been taught about these topics in previous classes:

“It was like something new that we’ve, like, never done, and we hadn’t done it in previous classes. I really liked doing this because it was, like, a nice change from the regular lessons that we had.” (Female, 14).

Students discussed their changed attitudes towards leftovers, and recognised the opportunity to use them up in the future.

They also discussed how they had used their new lessons from school in the home environment. At the beginning of the Re-licious intervention, many students had limited experience in the kitchen. However, by the end, students discussed ideas of quick and simple meals they could make at home on their own:

“I enjoyed coming up with all the different recipes that we could have at our house. Before, I wasn’t really sure of, like, what I could make with just a limited amount of ingredients at home. But now when I go home, I can see, ‘Oh, I can make a pasta’, or something like that.” (Male, 14)

Overall, Re-licious successfully promoted nutrition and food waste reduction in the school setting. The students felt more capable in the kitchen and changed their attitudes towards leftovers.

As young people have the power to create a future sustainable food system, we must engage them with information about nutrition and sustainability within the school curriculum. We plan to continue promoting Re-licious, and implement the program into the curriculum at more schools to teach young people about nutrition and food waste reduction.

A manuscript describing the intervention in more detail has been published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Thank you to the participating school and students. We would like to acknowledge the Bowen Street Press from RMIT University, which worked with us to publish the Re-licious Recipes eBook.

This article was co-authored with Professor Linda Brennan and Dr Michaela Jackson, from the Communication and Change Co-Lab (3C)