PROJECT PRINCIPLES
School meals will offer daily meals to about 2 million children. Meals are served five days a week, with the exception of holidays, holidays, and director's leave, which is almost ten months a year. Almost 400 million meals are issued annually.
The quality of everyday food, even within school meals, has a great impact on health, especially in children who grow and develop. Although food plays an important and very pleasant role in our lives, the school catering system is a cinderella in the whole colossus of education.
However, Cinderella can become the queen of the ball. All that is needed is to join forces, name weaknesses precisely and find clear and concrete solutions that would help increase and control the quality of school meals.
All children should be entitled to the same quality standard of school meals.
The project We have it on a plate (hereinafter referred to as MTNT) wants to name these quality standards and propose a system of regular evaluation of quality indicators, which would lead to the development of the entire system and gradual improvement.
The school catering system is very complex and its quality reflects a number of areas (which at first glance may not even be obvious). In each of them you can find more or less room for improvement. But one thing is clear, all areas need to be addressed, because they are all inextricably linked and interact.
So far, the problems that were just burning were always solved, and the system was not seen as a whole. We encounter the most criticism of dishes on a plate, but before they reach the plate in sufficient nutritional and sensory quality, it is preceded by a number of steps, and if they escape attention, there will never be the result we would like for children every day.
Currently, a group of carefully selected experts is developed within the MTNT for each area, who develop quality standards. So a kind of user-friendly and easy-to-understand instructions on what needs to be done to ensure quality in a given area.
These instructions will be gradually added to this website and school canteens will be able to apply these rules in their practice.
Within the MTNT project, we manage to connect two areas that have always worked separately, namely science and gastronomy. Science must define what nutritional parameters the diet should meet for children, sick and healthy people, seniors and gastronomy will provide a professional way to achieve such a result through properly chosen ingredients, culinary techniques, including the attractive appearance of the food.
An integral part of the whole project, which we must not forget is the perception of school meals by the general public and the overall climate within the system, so we allowed ourselves to choose our own terminology, which is now not fully in line with legislation.
The school canteen, which meets quality standards in all areas, is a school restaurant for us. It is not the diners, but the customers, because it is they who are the center of attention and their needs and taste preferences are taken into account, all with regard to their health. They are the ones who should look forward to food and like to go to the school restaurant. They have the right information about diet from the diet and thanks to them they build responsibility for their health, human work and nature.
The word restaurant was first used in 1765 by the Parisian chef Boulanger, who offered "bouillons restaurants" near the Louvre, ie "strengthening broths". The more general term "restaurant" was not adopted until around 1850 for places where meals are prepared and served to customers. The word "restaurant" comes from the Latin "restaurare" and means "renewal". Renewal - energy, health, good mood… Where else should such a "renewal" take place than at school?
Our project currently has 17 pilot school canteens, which are educated in culinary techniques, test the standards proposed by us in their operations and help us prepare them so that they are understandable and usable in practice without compromise. You are free to use the published standards and implement them in the practice of your school canteens. Feedback from you is also important to us.
A number of well-known culinary faces help us voluntarily with the gastronomic side - ie with recipes, and their operationally optimized preparation. Which, like us, doesn't care how children perceive gastronomy, the quality of which can greatly affect their health.
We always build standards on scientifically validated information, examples of good practice, and we strive to develop them so that they are unambiguous, specific, understandable, and applicable in all operations.
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