Mentor visit GAL Someș-Nadăș

Exactly one year after we were welcomed to Almada by our Portuguese partners, it was time for us at GAL Someș-Nadăș to return the favour. We organised a study visit in our territory, near Cluj-Napoca, and tried our best to show our partners at Agrupamento de Escolas Anselmo de Andrade & Erasmus MC our culture and aspects of our daily reality regarding healthy food in schools.

One thing that’s important to know about Romania is that our love language is food. The more one likes you, the more food they will feed you. Is this a good thing? Arguably, especially since we are one of the EU countries with the highest rate of obesity and child obesity. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that in Romania, about 1 in 4 children aged 6-19 years is overweight or obese. So this is where we are starting from.

Another thing to note is that we are a relatively bureaucratic country. While things are slowly changing for the better, we’re not yet where we would like to be. One aspect in which we strongly feel this is school meals. While „Constantin Brâncoveanu” Secondary School in Baciu, which is involved in this project as our direct beneficiary, is now part of the government’s pilot programme that offers a daily meal to pupils, the school doesn’t really have a say in the process. This is why we decided not to focus on fighting windmills, but instead to do what we can do best: education.

Our action plan includes creating a syllabus for an optional course on healthy food, for secondary school students. We worked alongside Malvina Bica, a certified nutritionist specialising in working with children and youth, who put together the content for 33 classes, following the regulations of our Ministry of Education.

The study visit was also the big reveal of our syllabus, and we had some very productive workshops where we discussed our action plan with our partners and with relevant stakeholders, including the vice-mayor of Baciu, the school principal, students, teachers, and parents. Our partners from Almada presented their 50-year-long experience with school meals, and we all drew our own conclusions. It was very empowering to see the optimism of everyone in the group regarding Romania’s future with school meals, and we are all confident we can reach Almada’s position in less than 50 years.

We also wanted our partners to experience a bit of our lifestyle and culture. Our organisation creates opportunities and facilitates access to EU funding for developing rural areas. We took our guests off the beaten path to explore some ethnographic gems in our territory, including a local producer of dairy products and matured cheeses, a dowry museum in Săvădisla and the Buffalo Museum in Mera, a church from the 13th century, and a stone-carving factory renowned for the quality of the stones.

Our love language being food, we also had our guests try out as many of our local foods as we could, from homemade langos and doughnuts to mixed grills and traditional soups. Have we exaggerated the amounts? As we often do here in Transylvania, yes. Are we sorry? Absolutely not. From where we’re standing, this visit was incredibly productive, and it was a great pleasure to host our partners here, after more than a year and a half of working together. We’re very happy with everything, from our progress to the help and support we got from everyone in this project, especially the Almada and Erasmus MC teams. The only thing we’re sorry for is that it will take quite long before we meet again face-to-face, for our final conference in Rotterdam.