The final joint week of FoodHeroes took place in Portugal. From 28 September to 2 October, Agrupamento de Escolas de Mangualde hosted sixteen students and their teachers from Portugal, Croatia, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Norway. SOML sent four students and two teachers. One question ran through the whole week: what can you still do with what would normally be thrown away?
The week, day by day
- Monday: welcome ceremony, teams introducing themselves, a tour of the school and, in the afternoon, a visit to the Palácio dos Condes de Anadia and the centre of Mangualde.
- Tuesday: the workshop Cultural Diversity in Food, in two parts, on how food carries its own story in every country. Then a visit to a restaurant in Mangualde, where students saw what happens to food left over.
- Wednesday: a visit to one of the large supermarkets in Mangualde, where students saw what happens to products close to or past their expiry date, and a guided tour of the Gomes Eanes de Azurara school. In the afternoon they worked on their own films for the FoodWise campaign, to wake up their peers about waste at school.
- Thursday: a visit to the Escola Superior de Turismo e Hotelaria in Seia, with a workshop by chef Rui Cerveira on food safety and making smart use of leftovers. Then the village of Sabugueiro, where the guests got to know Portuguese cuisine and the landscapes of the Serra da Estrela, the Museu do Pão, and in the evening the old centre of Viseu with dinner at a fado house.
- Friday: a workshop for teachers on digital tools in sustainability education, led by the Bulgarian partner. Students finished their 45-second reel and two-minute video and showed them to each other. After lunch in the school canteen, all participants from the five countries received their certificates, followed by the always difficult farewell.
What the students made
The sixteen participants spent the week working on their own productions about food waste. Those films and reels will be shared through the channels of the five partner organisations and, together with the recipe collection, the EcoCuisine Hub and the SustainaQuest game, become available to other schools.
Follow the project
The project team shared the week day by day on social media, with photos of the supermarket, the kitchen in Seia and the certificate ceremony. You can find those posts on Instagram and Facebook. The students’ films will appear there in the coming weeks. The regional broadcaster in Mangualde published a news report about the week.
FoodHeroes ends in late October. What remains are the teaching materials, a recipe book with more than a hundred student recipes and a campaign showing that leftovers do not have to be waste. More on the FoodHeroes project page and at foodhero-project.eu.