The Education Ministry and the World Food Programme (WFP) have come up with a tool to make school meals nutritious and cost-efficient. The PLUS School Menu tool provides data on food and its nutritional contents which will guide schools in preparing healthy meals. The tool was launched today coinciding with the 2nd National School Nutrition Day.
The tool will help design menus that are not only nutritious but also cheaper and locally available. The tool was piloted at Punakha Central School in 2019. Results showed that although the optimised menu using the tool maintained the same nutritional value as that of the existing menu, it saved 20 per cent of the costs.
“We will be designing menus at the district level. We have already a set of a database in the system which consists of around 3,500 food items with nutrient contents and we need to enter the price data for the food items based on the local market,” said Udaya Sharma, the Programme Policy Officer with the WFP.
The trial results also showed that the tool increased the amount of food sourced from local farmers.
“This tool helps in designing a menu at the local level that means we can link with the farmers at the local community to source the food from them. That way it improves the local economy of the farmers where they can produce more and sell it to the schools based on the menu that they design. Their income can be increased,” he added.
Since the outbreak of the global pandemic in the country, more than 60,000 children missed out on school meals according to the WFP. The PLUS School menu is expected to improve the dietary diversity which is the number of different foods given to school students.
With the toolset to be implemented in all schools by 2022, the future for students in the country looks bright and healthy.
Kinzang Lhadon
