GOODFOOD education

Currently there is a strong need for a shift of higher education towards sustainability, approaching global concerns such as population growth, food security, water scarcity, climate change and other problems we face and we should target locally and globally, most of them being strongly influenced by our food systems. Embedded food systems are recognized nowadays to play an important role in the overall food systems shift towards sustainability. Therefore developing effective education in this subject area, taking into account students’ perspective, is of high relevance.

GOODFOOD thus had a mission to increases students and teachers skills and capacity to contribute towards the resilience and sustainability of embedded food systems in rural communities and territories. For this not only scientific, but especially local and traditional knowledge of food systems stakeholders plays a crucial role, as an indispensable basis for permanent adaptation of embedded food systems to current global challenges such as improvement of food production and quality, marketing practices, market fluctuations and competition, inclusiveness of stakeholders, consumer choices, food sovereignty, rural development and climate change adaptation.

To tackle this, the project consortium developed a broad spectrum of teaching activities and contents with the organization of 2 Intensive Study Programmes ‘Food systems embedded in territories’ where students from 6 EU universities were analysing various aspects of sustainability of the local food systems (in Münsterland and Piedmont regions) and their embeddedness in the territories. The Intensive Study Programmes were preceded by e-learning modules, to offer students specific background knowledge needed for further embedded food system exploration.

You can learn more about the GOODFOOD educational activities in the subsequent subpages.