Name: Sarah Mclellan
In as few simple sentences as possible describe what your pledge was: I allowed my children to choose how much food to put on their plates at meal times, with the option of seconds, rather than load their plates up. If they put food on their plate the onus will be on them to eat it.
How long did your pledge run for? 2 weeks
How did you do? Did you achieve your action for the time you chose? We only managed it for 10days, the children put too much food on their plates, although they did learn to put less on.
If not what got in your way? It was complicated because we wanted to choose the amount of fresh veg but not the amount of pasta or potato the children had a tendancy to put lots of the less nutritious elements of the meal.
What questions has your action raised? What do other families do – do people have good advice?
What was your biggest challenge as a group? Being consistent
What would you most like to share with others from you’re the experience of your pledge? The most success we had was when we gave the children the chance to think about the issue of food waste in their own terms, and decide what they thought was a good way of addressing it rather than imposing our idea of an action onto them.
Do you have a new pledge in the light of this experience? And or an idea for a campaign? Have a weekly family meeting including the children where we all get to say what we want to do to reduce our waste and how we are all feeling about it.
Anything else you would like to share? The idea seemed so simple, but life is complex, and it feels important to keep on trying, exploring different ideas to see what works, what empowers us and what undermines us in our target of being aware of, engaging with and reducing our waste.
Zero Waste Village 