With the idea that if you want to shape the world, you should start with your plate, the Agora Sant Cugat Campus Healthy School Meals Project aims to provide the most nutritional meals possible so that they are not only tasty but healthy for our growing students and that the dining experience is a happy one for everyone.
As we are all well aware, a healthy diet is one that allows the body to achieve and maintain an optimal function, preserve and restore health, reduce the risk of disease and promote optimal growth and development. It must be satisfactory, sufficient, complete, balanced, harmonious, safe, adapted, sustainable, affordable and, of course, tasty!
For this reason, our School Chef, Isaac Cortés, leads the project in the elaboration of the monthly menus with his staff and the educational aspects of nutrition and health are part of the comprehensive educational project of the Agora Sant Cugat Campus. It is also important for our families to know in depth all about the project so that they can fully collaborate at home.
Following the recommendations of the World Health Organisation and the Harvard Healthy Eating Plate (see image 1), we offer a diet based on natural food in place of processed products, mainly of vegetable origin (e.g. fruit, vegetables, integral grains etc.) with healthy proteins (e.g. fish, poultry, legumes, beans with limited red meat and cheese) and avoid sugar and ultra-processed products.
Children and staff are encouraged to drink water at any time throughout the day and everyone brings their reusable and refillable water bottles every day.
We have a School Dietician supervising all the menus and we offer three different daily menus – the General Menu, the Vegan Menu and the Baby Menu for our youngest children in Infant 0 & 1 who are still not eating solids.
To ensure that our Kitchen Staff are able to create top quality menus, the kitchen facilities have been totally reformed and modernised with the latest kitchen equipment (see photo 1).
We celebrate Meat-Free Monday every week, an international campaign founded by Paul McCartney and his daughters, Mary & Stella McCartney, that encourages people not to eat meat onMondays to improve their health and the health of the planet. We also celebrate International Menu Day every month to acknowledge the 70 different nationalities in our school (see photo 2) and Student Menu Day where different year groups vote their favourite first course, second course and dessert every month.
By promoting a healthy well-balanced diet in a happy and positive environment, we believe that our community will learn the importance of eating well to live well for all their lives!
