Sustainable food education: what food preparation competences are needed to support vegetable consumption?

Abstract

Contributing to more sustainable diets is a major challenge for contemporary environmental education. It implies an increase in the share of plant-based foods and of home-cooked meals. Awareness of this is widespread but taking concrete action is not easy. What competences does it call for? To identify them, we proposed an 8-month training course to groups of young adults in France. Their consumption of vegetables and the competences they mobilized were collected at the end of the training and 8 months later. The competences used by the participants with the lowest consumption of vegetables included controlling their food budget, collecting information about processed foods and planning what they would like to eat. The competences used by the participants with the highest consumption included planning meal preparation, being flexible, choosing quality products and mastering the preparation of fresh vegetables. These results are of interest for designing education programmes for sustainable diets.

Keywords:

• Food preparation skills
• cooking skills
• food skills
• culinary skills
• food competences
• food sustainability
• sustainable diet
• vegetable consumption

Acknowledgements

I thank Caroline Lecomte for her highly valuable contribution to the design and facilitation of the cooking workshop.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data supporting the results will be made available upon request to the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the regional authority Région Hauts de France.

Notes on contributors

Caroline Huyard

Caroline Huyard is a sociology researcher. Her current research focuses on behaviour change in the fields of healthcare and food. Her previous researchdealt with social recognition and rare disorders. .