What is School FEAST?
The establishment of the School FEAST (Food Excellence And Skills Training) Network is a landmark in the skilling and motivation of an essential workforce. Ensuring that everyone who works in schools has the skills and knowledge to provide good food during school hours, is essential to the long term health and welfare of our children and young people. The School FEAST network will ensure that today’s caterers and cooks will gain the skills they need and that the quality and motivation of future generations of providers will be maintained.
Nowadays we take good health for granted. Thank goodness we live in a part of the world with clean air, fresh water and plenty of good food. But increasingly the diet of our people is causing grave concern and recently senior Government specialist advisors have been on national television saying that obesity and diet-related illness is set to become the biggest killer in the next 20 years.
It’s a strange concept to absorb, that the food and drink we eat, if it is the wrong sort or taken in excess, can shorten our lives significantly and create many social problems. You only realise the true value of your health when you don’t have it. And we all know what it is like to feel under the weather with a bad cold or influenza. Imagine feeling ill every day of your life!
On average our lifespan, if we live a healthily, is 1000 months. Put like that, those months go very quickly - and with the stark truth facing us that many pensioners will see their own children die before them if we do not make significant and permanent changes to eating (and drinking) habits, you will understand why the new nutritional guidelines and school meals have become such a central issue.
It is the BEGINNING of a major change which will take place over the next ten years, to limit the fat and sugar content and chemicals in processed foods and indeed in any establishment serving food to the public, be it in a school, a cafe or restaurant, or in a care home...it is ALL going to change...and we need to be ready for it.
The Ashburton School FEAST Partnership has been established to provide the resources and training neccessary for Devon and Cornwall.
