Healthy Habits, Happy Feast: Celebrating Nutrition Month with a Colorful Harvest of Health, Culture and Community

Get ready to feast your eyes and your taste buds on a world of nutritious delights! July is nutrition month in the Philippines and it’s the perfect time to prioritize eating and nutrition. Celebrating nutrition month is important to be held in school because it promotes healthy eating habits, encourages awareness about nutrition, supports overall well-being, involves parents and community and makes learning about nutrition fun and interactive and improve eating habits by motivating students to choose fruits, vegetables, and nutritious meals over junk food. It also creates healthy school environment with better food options in canteens and more active lifestyles. Dayap Elementary School is promoting healthy eating habits through a fun contest. Each grade level is tasked with preparing dishes that showcase GO, GLOW and GROW foods following the food pyramid guidelines. Before the nutrition day, this school held a conference of teacher and parents to discuss the plan for the event.

  Before the program begins, all grade levels participated on a parade that was led by their chosen participant for Mr. and Ms. Nutrition of Dayap Elementary School. All the student wear head dress and carry their basket of fruits. The students have different color of shirts that was assigned on their grade level. The joy they feel is clearly written on their faces as they take part in this event. Parents and teachers shows full support for the students.

The day before the nutrition, we prepared the tables we would use for our presentation. Since the theme is about “Barrio Fiesta’’ we used various designs that showcase traditional Filipino elements like colorful banners, banana tree and abanico. For the background we used blue cloth with white and silver combination to make it more presentable. In our food display that follows food pyramid guidelines of Go, Glow and Grow foods, we brought different Filipino dishes that can be found in fiesta celebration here in the Philippines.

The food display includes pakbet, mix of vegetables such as okra, squash, bitter gourd, eggplant, long beans, chopsuy mix vegetables such as cabbage, carrots, beans and chayote, crab in coconut milk, vegetable spring roll, boiled egg, rice and loaf bread. Our food display is consist of go, grow and glow foods. We also include the basket of fruits brought by the students of grade III Narra.

We also include different kind of fresh fruits such as watermelon, papaya, pineapple, cucumber, coconut, dragon fruit, apple, oranges, banana and grapes. For fresh vegetables we have squash, bitter gourd, banana blossoms and water spinach leaves. The desserts are some sweet delicacies like steamed rice cake, white pudding, rice cake and glutinous rice cake wrapped in banana leaves.

These pictures are the food displays of each grade level at Dayap Elementary School. They also used different materials designed in line with the theme barrio fiesta. It’s fun to look at and the food prepared by each parent is appetizing and mouthwatering. This king of celebration is very important to educate the youth about proper nutrition. Activities like food displays, cooking demos or tastings make learning about nutrition engaging.