Aside from reducing food waste, Melo-Rijk shared other ways on how the participants could practice sustainable dining everyday. Examples of these would include buying local and seasonal produce, consuming more fruits and vegetables while lessening meat consumption, preparing only a suitable amount of food for every meal, ordering only what can be finished when dining out, limiting the number of visits to establishments that do all-you-can-eat style dining, and refusing single-use plastics. She also shared ways on how the participants, as teachers, can help promote sustainable dining in their respective schools and encourage their respective students to take on the sustainable diner lifestyle. “It’s easy to teach and promote sustainable dining in schools. We can utilize produce from our Gulayan sa Paaralan gardens and encourage students to eat fruits and vegetables by offering healthier food options in canteens. If we want our students to be conscious about the food they waste, we can also start food waste audits, where we measure food waste in our canteens. We can also start observing the portion sizes of meals given to the children,” says Melo-Rijk. “In relation to this, we can encourage students to start taking only the amount of food they can confidently finish and put signages around to remind them to avoid producing food waste. If we observe that there are specific items in the canteen menu that students don’t really eat, let’s change it to items that they enjoy but are still nutritious. Let’s continue teaching them the importance of waste segregation and encourage them to avoid using single-use plastics as much as possible.” After the two sessions, WWF gave away kits per school containing modules 1 and 2 of The Sustainable Diner project’s teaching manuals and headgear props from the Environmental Education Unit’s “Ang Kwento ng Climate Change,” which the teachers can use during their own lessons to make the topic more fun, enjoyable, and interactive for the students.

The Sustainable Diner project would like to thank the ABS-CBN Foundation for inviting us to attend SwellFest 2019 and for allowing us to share our advocacy on sustainable dining with the teachers from Gubat, Sorsogon. Teachers play a major role in ensuring that our children are equipped with the right knowledge, motivation, and disposition when it comes to dealing with the climate crisis we are experiencing all over the world today. With their guidance and their help, we believe that together, it is possible for us to nurture our children and mold them to become environmentally conscious Filipino citizens!