The Lost Food Project

The Sustainable Learning Goals symbolises the main issues that we are facing around the globe as we are striving for a better future. In the IPC, the learners are given the opportunity to develop the global competence through interesting and exciting challenges that are linked to the Sustainable Development Goals.

At Straits International School, Rawang, while working on our Year 3 unit ‘Different Places, Similar lives’, we came across the International Task that highlights two learning goals: Know about organisations that help others and be able to associate cause and effect related to global events and/or issues. The children first researched organisations that help people in need in Malaysia. We came across a few of them and contacted them. We were lucky enough to get a response from one of the global charities ‘The Lost Food’. They were very happy to come to our school to share about what they do during our Key Stage assembly. 

It was interesting to hear about the numbers and information that was shared with us. Almost 1/3 of food produced in the world is either lost or wasted. In Malaysia 3000 tonnes of edible food is thrown away each day. This is enough to feed 10 million people. This organisation help rescue an average of 10 tonnes of food per week from going to the landfill and unfortunately is it still not enough. To be able to help and support this global issue, we need to start now, and the best place is from school where children are given to opportunity to learn and understand what is happening around us.

After this talk, we started the ‘Clean your plate challenge’, where we paid attention to how much food the children eat and waste. We took some pictures of the bin to help them see how much we waste. We continued this process for three weeks, and we could slowly see some changes where children started to take smaller amounts of food, checking the time before going for a second round, encouraging each other and becoming more aware of how much they really need to eat and understanding the concept of ‘what we want, and what we really need’. 

To keep the momentum going, we continued this process by carrying out ‘The Food Drive’ where the children rescued some of the food items that they don’t need or are nearly expired in their own homes. The Year 3s helped to organise the items into different categories to see what type of food were being donated the most. It was then donated to the lost food charity. Learning experiences like this is something that our children will always remember, and I hope these little things that we do in school can inspire them to do more in the future for a better world. I truly appreciate ideas like this!