Health Education and the Future of Natural Resources: Food Safety, Food Waste and the Culture of Sustainability

Food safety, food security and its counterpart, food waste, are among the priorities set by the new UN Sustainability Development Goals (SDG) and the 2030 Agenda. The SDG 12, in particular, focuses on ensuring "sustainable consumption and production patterns". The implications of this challenge are multi-layered: economic, social, political and, above all, cultural. Vocational education on such topics, addressed to students from two upper secondary schools, was the main goal of a three-year project implemented by Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale dell'Abruzzo e del Molise between 2016 and 2018. It was carried out in the framework of the National School Reform entered into force in 2015, as a contribution to implement the overall lifelong learning policies set by the EU 2020 Strategy, the Copenhagen Process and the Lisbon Strategy on Vocational Education and Training. Educational activities were dedicated to specific, interrelated themes, such as the "One Health" approach, food safety, environmental sustainability, the experimental method, and the techniques to disseminate scientific knowledge to peers through digital tools, with a focus on social media. Class activities, visits to laboratories, creation of digital communication tools under the supervision of scientific experts, testing of e-cloud instruments and practical qualitative and quantitative research exercises were the main methodological and conceptual tools utilised so far. Questionnaires and daily diaries were filled by the project beneficiaries and their families. Indeed, during the third year, the health education project was centred on food waste and food safety, as an attempt to sum up the previous experiences, but also as a way to introduce the beneficiaries into a real research environment. The students were involved in an ongoing research project on the balanced distribution of food through the application of a method for waste reduction and sustainable social solidarity. They were asked to measure their household waste. Training methods based on adult learning principles were applied to upper secondary school students, increasing their responsibility, self-confidence, and the value of peer-to-peer education and learning. The success of this initiative encourages the authors to further explore this approach and to increase connections between high school students and the working environment of a research institution.