I'm a school lunch designer, balancing nutrition and creativity

If students were allowed to plan school lunches themselves, what kind of dream dishes would appear? If the one meal they eat at school every day were handed over to the children to design, what creative ideas could they come up with?

School lunch is the most important source of nutrition and calories for students during their time at school. To encourage students to express their ideas more, the Foodiedu Association is holding the "I'm a School Lunch Designer" illustrated and essay submission event, inviting elementary and junior high school students to pick up a pen and draw or write down their ideal school lunch. The submission period runs from now until September 27. This submission event is cooperating with FamilyMart for the first time. Selected works will be published on the Foodiedu Association's official website and publications and will receive a FamilyMart gift card worth 1,000 yuan. Participants also have a chance to become student judges for the second Taiwan School Lunch Competition and take part in person in the 2019 strongest Taiwan school lunch showdown.

Huang Jialin, secretary-general of the Foodiedu Association, said that after visiting school lunch programs in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, the menus students love most are invariably curry and fried chicken. But will the menus they design definitely be just fried chicken cutlets, bubble tea, pizza and spaghetti? Perhaps there will also be creativity beyond our expectations?

Campus lunch is the most important part of putting food education into practice, letting children eat their fill and eat healthily, and also hoping they can taste education and the meaning of cultural inheritance. The Foodiedu Association invites students, who are the main recipients of school meal services, to express their ideas, and to serve alongside experts and scholars as judges for the lunch competition. On the one hand, this lets their opinions be seen, and at the same time it is hoped they will spend a little more time understanding where their food comes from.

Last year's first Taiwan School Lunch Competition already had two student judges participating, respectively a fifth-grade boy and a sixth-grade girl from elementary school. The young judges said that ordinarily they did not think cooking was anything special, but this time, seeing the professional kitchen equipment and the chefs and nutritionists from each school cooking together, they realized that cooking is truly not simple. They look forward to an event this meaningful every year, so that more people know that Taiwan's nutritious lunches can also be delicious.

The "I'm a School Lunch Designer" submissions are open to elementary and junior high school students. Entries are divided into two categories: drawings and essays. The theme is to depict the ideal school lunch in mind and the design concept. For the drawing category, please use 8-mo size (about 26 x 38 cm) flat artwork, with no restriction on medium; for the essay category, please type horizontally in 12-point New Mingliu. Handwritten works should be written in traditional Chinese on manuscript paper. The junior high school group is limited to 500 characters or fewer, and the elementary school group to 300 characters or fewer.

For detailed submission guidelines, please refer to the Foodiedu Association's official event information: https://www.foodiedu.org/project/324

[Press contacts]
Zeng Ni (Project Manager, Foodiedu Association) 02-66365870 / [email protected]
Huang Jialin (Secretary-General, Foodiedu Association) 0978-207831 / [email protected]