What are the essential ingredients for explaining integral ecological regeneration to 140 high school students?
- Choose the right location, one capable of conveying knowledge and understanding directly. In this sense, Cilento represents an extraordinary open-air classroom where students can experience firsthand what regeneration truly means.
- Choose the right storytellers: authentic and credible people who can offer real and tangible testimony. Bringing students into direct contact with the people who are driving the change already underway, and learning from their experience and lived reality, is what can transform school into a place of direct experience rather than one based only on theoretical and passive learning.
- Choose participatory methods: a class that shares ideas, reasons together and works towards common goals creates the foundation for strengthening a sense of unity and active citizenship.
Starting from these three elements, students from Liceo A. Pansini in Naples were able to experience firsthand the power of collaboration.
At the Port of Acciaroli, with the Mediterranean wind in their hair and the warm early-autumn sun above them, the students and their teachers met our Sara Roversi, who encouraged them to reflect on the role of food in our lives, as well as on the 2030 Agenda, the paradoxes and challenges of the agrifood sector, and the urgent need for sustainable innovation and integral ecology.
It was with the Mayor of Pollica, Stefano Pisani, however, that the students were able to focus more concretely on what the Mediterranean Diet truly is.
A simple question became an opportunity to reflect on the environmental, social and cultural impact of our lifestyles; to talk about agriculture and farmers, climate change, and the role of farmers, conviviality, women, knowledge, recipes and biodiversity; to move from Ancel Keys to the need for balance, from current stereotypes surrounding the Mediterranean Diet to the food of the future.
Because all of this is the Mediterranean Diet, and it is crucial to continue co-designing ways in which tradition and innovation can work together in service of the Mediterranean.
This meeting with the students of Liceo A. Pansini in Naples took place on the occasion of the FAO Science and Innovation Forum, demonstrating how essential it is to involve younger generations not only from behind school desks, but also through immersive, hands-on experiences in the field.
