Rufford Primary School achieved 431 swaps over the course of a month thanks to the work of the catering team at Nottingham City Council’s catering service. The pupils at Rufford Primary regularly eat vegetarian meals as Eat Culture catered schools have one meat free day a week throughout the year.
Kumar Murugan, who works at Rufford Primary School as a chef supervisor said: “I like to engage with the children and I always have a chat with them when they come up to the hatch so when I told them about ‘Swap It’ a lot of the children really got on board with it.
“Having small tasters of the vegetarian meal ahead of the day really made a difference as children could find out if they like the food before having it as a main meal.
“The children, especially those on the student council, were interested in how eating vegetarian can be good for the environment and wanted to talk about the information poster we had in the school.”
The catering team worked with meat free pioneer Quorn, who have been trailblazing meat free foods for over 40 years. Through its network with schools, Quorn is hoping to inspire future generations to establish sustainable eating habits that are good for their health and the planet.
The team used Quorn’s sustainability calculator to show that the swaps had saved around 478kgCO2e – equal to the emissions of driving 361 miles on a school bus or powering 96 computers in a year.