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Eating better with Food for Life

News | Published  8 April 2022

The Food for Life Partnership is driving positive behaviour change by inspiring children and communities to eat foods that are healthy for them, and for the planet.

Almost 170 million Food for Life Catering Mark meals are served each year across the UK. Rob Percival shows how the Food for Life Partnership is driving positive behaviour change by inspiring children and communities to choose to eat foods that are healthy for them, and for the planet.

The Food for Life Partnership is working with schools and communities across the UK to transform food culture. This means reconnecting with where our food comes from; it means repossessing the life skills we need to cook and grow and be in control of what we eat; and it means realigning our diets to be healthier and more sustainable – eating less meat, eating better meat, and eating a greater diversity of fruit and vegetables.

Almost 5,000 schools have enrolled with the Food for Life Partnership to date. These schools have adopted a ‘whole school approach’ that sees them growing their own veg, organising trips to farms, sourcing food from local producers, setting up school farmers’ markets, holding community food events, providing cooking and growing clubs for pupils and their families, and serving freshly prepared, sustainable meals under the Food for Life Catering Mark.

The result, in many cases, is a notable shift in pupil behaviour. Steve Mason, gardener at St John the Baptist CE School, a Food for Life Partnership school in Hackney, discovered children filling their pockets with Brussels sprouts growing in the school vegetable patch – the children were crunching on raw sprouts and handing them out like sweets in the playground.

Inde­pendent evaluation has demonstrated a 28% increase in the number of primary school chil­dren who reported eating their five-a-day, while nearly half of all parents reported eating more vegetables as a result of the programme.

The ‘whole school approach’ has been shown to drive positive behaviour change, inspiring children and communities to choose to eat foods that are healthy for them, and for the planet.

The Food for Life Catering Mark provides an independent guarantee that menus are freshly prepared, seasonal and better for animal welfare. The Catering Mark is in 25% of English schools, 300 nurseries, and a growing number of universities, workplaces, care homes, cafés and hospitals – almost 170 million Catering Mark meals are served each year.

Under the Catering Mark, all meat and fish must satisfy UK welfare standards and must be sustainably sourced, and at Silver and Gold levels of the scheme, caterers are rewarded for serving an increasing percentage of organic produce, and for having one or more meat-free days on the menu each week, while taking steps to reduce meat consumption by making vegetable-based dishes the principal dish of the day.

Caterers have shown this to be economically viable. For example, ISS Education prepares over 6,500 Gold standard meals every day for schools across the London Borough of Merton; their menus are designed to encourage children to choose to eat more fruit and vegetables, and include MSC certified fish and a selection of free range and organic products. ISS Education saw meal uptake increase in consecutive years, by 7% and 10%, when they achieved the Catering Mark.

Nottingham University Hospital meanwhile supplies patients, staff and visitors with Catering Mark Gold standard meals that include locally sourced meat and vegetables, and organic milk and free range pork – three high quality meals each day, at an ingredient cost price of £4.53 per patient per day, which is below the national average for hospitals.

By increasing the prevalence of plant-based dishes and by sourcing high quality meat, caterers can reduce their climate impact – and it doesn’t have to cost them more. Research by Manchester University has found that Catering Mark Gold menus have up to 47% lower climate impact than standard school menus, and this is mainly due to more sustainable menu planning and meat sourcing. 

The Food for Life Partnership emphasised this point in our response to the Department for Education’s recent public consultation on the draft revised standards for food in schools.

Introducing revised standards for food in schools was one of the actions in the School Food Plan, which sets out a vision of a ‘new golden age’ for school food. The revised standards are intended to provide caterers with a framework on which to develop interesting, creative and nutritionally-balanced menus.

In our response to the consultation, the Food for Life Partnership stress that this framework can also drive greater sustainability by stipulating that schools have one or more meat-free days each week, and that non-meat sources of protein be readily available to all children. All children, we say, should be encouraged to moderate their meat consumption and become more familiar with plant-based dishes, for both health and climate impact reasons.

The Food for Life Partnership’s ‘whole school approach’ has shown that children and communities can be inspired to choose to eat foods that are healthy for them, and for the planet; and the Catering Mark has shown that it is possible for caterers to cut climate emissions, while putting good quality, fresh and nutritious food on the plate, and at scale. A healthier and more sustainable food future requires nothing less. 

Rob Percival is Policy Officer for the Food for Life Partnership