The project CHEEP (Cooking Healthy European Paths) comes from the idea to develop and enrich a very useful and positive experience promoted by the Italian Research Council (CNR) with the collaboration of IPSSEOA “Pietro Piazza” of Palermo, the biggest catering vocational school in Southern Italy.
During the year 2018, in fact, after having observed data about children affected by health problems related to specific dietary needs, CNR promoted the activation of the project DADO (acronym of Diet, Allergy, Diabetes and Obesity) to inform and teach families with children suffering from these diseases, to adopt a correct dietary style to face these pathologies. DADO project provided several theoretical and practical classes where scientific experts and chefs met families to provide knowledge and tools to live “cooking” as a pleasant moment. They shared useful suggestions on how to deal with special dietary needs without loosing the pleasure to eat tasty food. Moreover, the project promoted the idea to rediscover and redesign, with a new healthy approach, traditional dishes, demonstrating that limits are often a challenging starting point to explore and find new possibilities.
This excellent experience arose the desire to create a wider partnership including the University of Palermo (UNIPA) and three foreign partners. UNIPA will develop observation tools to assess and evaluate knowledge, attitude and perception that teachers, students and their families have about healthy cooking. Foreign partners will give the project an international dimension giving the possibility to share good practices while enriching the experience with an intercultural view of cuisine as a strong heritage element, to be re-thought with a new, innovative, healthier outlook.
A further value of the project is the mobility for students who, in many cases, have never left their home country before. This opportunity will produce a long lasting positive effect on their European awareness improving also their language skills and competence in the English language.
So the project will produce concrete, long-lasting effects on the organizations involved in the planned activities: the mutual goal, in fact, is the implementation of these innovations by all partner schools, through the creation of a specific new path of education and qualification within catering vocational schools curricolo , granting and releasing a final specializing certification for the professional recognition of acquired competences. Target groups are both teachers and students. Teachers will be trained during the first part of the project through webinars and meetings arranged and issued by CNR. Afterwards teachers will train students, providing professional competences through real, learning-by-doing practices and ICT- based methodologies increasing motivation and satisfaction. Good practices will be socialized among school teachers and students, planning activities to share experiences for an interpersonal professional development in a dynamic environment . Moreover, the creation of a system of recognition and validation of this new students’ profile, both for professional transversal skills, describing and defining qualifications in terms of learning outcomes, would greatly encourage entrepreneurship and increase opportunities for employability at local, national or international level.
Besides, CNR studies and results, could reach greater effectiveness and echo for the benefit of local, regional, national and international communities, in particular for those families whose children suffer from these diseases and whose socio-economic or cultural condition doesn’t produce a correct approach to support their children needs.
The creation of a free open multimedia and multi language digital book in Augmented Reality, containing suggestions and clear, simple, attracting recipes with explanatory videos for their correct realization, will be an effective tool to support families and children, with the possibility to add new contents even after the project conclusion. The book, easily accessible from the different partner websites, could also become an extraordinary “melting pot” of social, linguistic and cultural identities as it would result from the cooperation with partners from four different countries and active in different fields.
