February 2022 – Greener By Default at the University of Victoria

School Nutrition and Healthy Eating

Liberal.ca
Children need healthy, nutritious food to grow and learn. Currently over 3 million children in Canada are living without guaranteed access to nutritious school meals.
A re-elected Liberal government will:

Work with our provincial, territorial, municipal, Indigenous partners, and stakeholders to develop a National School Food Policy and work towards a national school nutritious meal program with a $1 billion dollar investment over five years.
Introduce new restrictions on the commercial marketing of food and beverages to children and establish new front-of-package labelling to promote healthy food choices.

See also:

“Finally, Liberals are putting school food programs on the menu”

Marc Fawcett-Atkinson, National Observer, January 19th 2022

Healthy, delicious school food could soon be on the plates of millions of Canadian children after the federal government recently committed to tackling the issue at a national level.

In December, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tasked the ministers responsible for agriculture and children and social development with creating a national policy for school food. It is the first time the federal government has committed to supporting school food programs. These programs typically provide free or heavily subsidized breakfasts and lunches to all students, and have been shown to improve public health, support learning, and boost economic growth.

Canada is the only G7 country without a national school food program, ranking 37th out of the world’s 41 wealthiest countries when it comes to feeding schoolchildren, according to a 2017 UNICEF study. The situation is particularly dire in Québec and the Western provinces, where only a fraction of schools have food programs. In contrast, almost all schools in the Atlantic provinces and the three territories have meal programs, according to 2021 research from the University of Guelph….

[… Read more at National Observer ]

Z. Zane McNeill, Sentient Media, February 10, 2022

A student-led outreach campaign supported by the climate and animal justice group Animal Rebellion has mobilized hundreds of students at over 20 UK universities. The students are calling for their universities to drop animal products from their catering menus before the 2023-24 academic year.

Student activist Vaania Kapoor Achuthan, 19, from University College London says that in order to ensure a sustainable future, major institutions like colleges and universities have a responsibility to move “towards 100% just and sustainable plant-based catering.” Achuthan and other students argue that universities choosing to include animal products in their cafeterias not only illustrates complicity in the climate crisis, but also makes it more difficult for them to reach their sustainability goals.

Despite a 2006 United Nations report that found that animal agriculture emitted more greenhouse emissions than all of the transportation sector combined, progress mitigating the impact of animal agriculture on climate change has been slow, and the situation has grown more dire. Animal agriculture currently contributes at least 37 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, although estimates vary, is responsible for 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide emissions, and is the leading cause of deforestation around the world. Livestock emissions also account for 32 percent of human-caused methane emissions, which account for 30 percent of global warming to date. The environmental justice group CimateNexus reports that greenhouse gasses could be cut in half by the adoption of a plant-based diet, which is why these students are lobbying their universities to drop meat from their menus.

[… Read more at Sentient Media ]

Month: February 2022

Liberal Platform Commitment: $1 billion over 5 years

School Nutrition and Healthy Eating

UK Students Call for Plant-Based Meals at Universities to Fight Climate Change