Food
Climate-friendly food?
Focusing on food is a great gateway to make your youth activity eco-friendlier and learn about sustainable practices.
Get some inspiration in our introductory video and find a bunch of tips and tools below!
Test your knowledge
Best practices
Check out some of our best practices – and find even more in our free to download handbook!
Make veggie food the standard option
Many youth projects have great experiences with offering a plant-based diet. Simply reducing the amount of meat already has an impact.
Choose community cooking
An ideal activity to connect people and learn about culture and sustainability. “is community cooking” Rent an (outdoor) kitchen for a day to organise a cooking session.
Know your delicious vegetarian recipes
Explore local and seasonal fruits and veggies in your area. Experiment and be creative when creating new veggy recipes. Write down recipes and share!
Cooperate with a local farmer or garden
Check for options to cooperate with local producers – some might produce ecological food without having the expensive certification!
Talk about the diet
Inform your participants beforehand about the (plant-based) diet you will offer and talk about your motives!
Normalise saving leftovers
Serve leftovers in the next break. And what could we do today with yesterday’s rice leftovers? Stuff some peppers, for example.
Say “no” to unnessary packaging
If you organise picnics or take-away lunches, think about sustainable ways to pack the food, such as lunch boxes or beeswax wraps.
Create connections with the food
Interview the cook, do an excursion to a local market or veggie garden; do a sustainable cooking challenge, or a “hand on the soil” session!
Step out of the rush
Observe the changing landscape, reflect, listen to a podcast or music, read a good book or prepare for the learning encounter ahead. Travel ‘slow’.
Hop on!
Participants from the same country or region could hop on the same bus or train, or organise a car-sharing.
Enjoy
the differences in landscape and culture more through slow travel.
Time for
Finally reading that book!
The bonus
Travel time can be used to get to know each other, and participants can report about their travels on social media. Perhaps they could even do fun tasks together!
Regional partnerships
Why not make a regional project and explore diversity in your surroundings?
Nearby partners
Collaboration with nearby partner countries improves the chance that participants will choose green means of travel to reach the activity venue.
Taking distance into account
When planning a new project can help to avoid long travel for participants in the first place.
What is a green travel policy?
A travel policy that sets standards for green travelling. A great way to reduce your travel emissions on the organisational level.
Ideas for your own travel policy?
Till 600 kilometres distance use grounded transportation (such as buses, ships, shared taxis, shuttles or similar).
The bonus
Travel time can be used to get to know each other, and participants can report about their travels on social media. Perhaps they could even do fun tasks together!
Travel time = Working time.
Consider (a part of ) the time travelled as working time. Discuss which task to complete during the travel.
Hop on!
Participants from the same country or region could hop on the same bus or train, or organise a car-sharing.
Enjoy
the differences in landscape and culture more through slow travel.
Time for
Finally reading that book!
“From the porridge in the morning we made delicious oat cookies for the evening tea. We reduce food waste to an absolute minimum. But the key is: cook so tasty that nobody misses anything. Food is emotion. Delicious food is what it is about.”
Food self assessment
Need food for thought, material for discussion or concrete steps for action?
Do your self assessment and see where you are now, what you are good at and where there is space to improve.
Create your bucket list
So, what is next for you? Take a look at the list below and pick what you will do next.
Feel free to prioritize your top five actions for your upcoming projects.
Useful links
Ideas for veggie recipes
- Green Roots – Vegan Culinary Strategies for NGOs
- Simple Vegan Blog
- 10 cheap and healthy veggie meals
- Vegetarian recipes for a crowd
- Forkranger
Off-grid methods of cooking
Further reading
- Planet-Based Diets Impact & Action Calculator
- Meat Atlas: Facts & Figures about meat
- EUFIC: Map to explore seasonal fruits and vegetables in Europe
- Green Erasmus: Food
Download the ECOrasmus handbook
Find many more tips, best practice examples and tools in our handbook! Download it now for free:
The webpage was prepared with the financial support of the European Union. It reflects the views only of the authors, and the Programme cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.