23,000 primary school children in Tower Hamlets took their first steps this week into an eco-labelled menu with fish certified by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). The healthy new lunch menu includes salmon fish fingers, steamed Hoki fillet and homemade fisherman’s pie – all of them labelled with the MSC’s blue fish-tick eco-label that guarantees the fish were caught sustainably.
As well as eating the eco-labelled fish, the children also started learning about the problems of overfishing through the Fish & Kids project. Fish & Kids aims to teach pupils how fish gets onto our plates – from ocean to oven – why it is good for us and why we are in danger of running out of fish. Schools across the borough will be using Fish & Kids materials to teach their pupils about the need for a solution to the global problems of overfishing to ensure there will always be enough fish to feed children just like them.
What Chef Ainsley Harriot says
Celebrity Chef Ainsley Harriot introduces Fish & Kids: “The MSC’s Fish & Kids project is a fantastic way of getting everyone involved in caring for our seas…” says Ainsley, “We can all try and help to protect our oceans by choosing the MSC eco-label, as often as we can, from the school cafeteria, in restaurants and at home.”
What Tower Hamlets Borough Council says
Michael Hales from Tower Hamlets Borough Council says: "I am thrilled that Tower Hamlets is the first London Borough to offer MSC products. It is important that from a young age there is an understanding where food comes from and how it is produced. This scheme will in turn encourage many to become responsible consumers in later life."
Seventy Eight schools in Tower Hamlets are involved in Fish & Kids and project manager, Laura Stewart says that more are due to join: “At the moment, around 650,000 MSC-labelled fish fingers reach school lunch menus every year. Over the next year, more than a million MSC labelled fish fingers will be served in schools in England. Thanks to the blue MSC fish-tick eco-label the kids, parents and teachers can be sure that their fish fingers were caught sustainably and do not contribute to overfishing.”
Ben Jonson Primary School’s Catering Manager, Lamisi Narweh, says: ““The nutritional value of school dinners has been discussed a lot lately. With Fish & Kids we feed our children not only healthy food but make sure we have fish to serve in the future.”
Funding
Fish & Kids is a three-year project half funded by Defra, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Funding is also provided by the Project AWARE Foundation (International), www.projectaware.org
Further information
Pictures available.
For more information about Fish & Kids, please visit: www.fishandkids.org.uk.
For any media inquiries please contact [email protected] or Michael Hales, Tower Hamlets Borough Council on (020) 7364 5153 or email [email protected]
The MSC-labelled fish on the schools’ menus is supplied by Brakes Foodservice Solutions. For more information, please visit http://www.brake.co.uk/