A South African school, St Joseph of Royal Mount High School in Lesotho has joined together with its Global partner school, St Cenydd Comprehensive School in Wales, to compare their different picnicking habits. The activity came about as part of St Cenydd's drive to develop certain areas of their curriculum, such as global citizenship and sustainable development as well as firming international links with their partner school.

St. Cenydd School is located in Caerphilly, south Wales. Situated in extensive grounds, with panoramic views of the semi-rural Caerphilly basin, it is a popular, mixed, community school of over 1,100 pupils.  Lesotho is one of the countries most at risk from climate change and global food and fuel price rises. Decades of intensive agriculture have stripped the land of trees, and exposed soils to wind and rain. The community has risen to the challenges by creating 'key-hole' gardens.  These are round gardens of about two metres in diameter and raised to waist-height to make them easy for the sick and elderly to work. Inside, the garden-beds are layered with tin cans, mulch and ash which together provide the nutrients to make the gardens extraordinarily productive. The school has its own 'key-hole' garden and grows many things, from beetroot to spinach, onions, tomatoes and carrots.  A real incentive for all British schools to have kitchen gardens.

Year 8 pupils from both schools developed their own picnic project which centered around making and going on a picnic. The Welsh students collated information on traditional picnic food within their community such as sandwiches, fruit, cheese, eggs, crisps and juice.  Their South African counterpart's picnic was more vegetable based. Then the projects were exchanged so that both schools could compare and contrast the picnics.

The different types of picnic food used by each school provided St Cenydd's with a springboard for investigating healthy eating, food labelling in both countries, the sourcing of food, food miles and trade issues including Fairtrade.   Through the project they discovered that there were far more similarities than differences in food labelling in both Wales and Lesotho.  There seemed to be far more readily available fresh produce in Lesotho.  Convenience food in Wales had far more food miles than almost any of the products in Lesotho.  The pupils in Wales seemed far more aware of trade issues and had a greater knowledge of nutrients and a balanced diet than the St Joseph pupils.

St Cenydd students found the project informative and fascinating and hope to do a similar project again soon.

For more inspiring ideas about how to integrate British food into the Curriculum, see the Love British Food resource guide Putting the Ooo! back into food [click here]