Local food in the classroom: Sowing nutrition and climate resilience in the young generation

Dinnar Diandra Anugera Tejamulyawan
Forest Resource Conservation and Ecotourism student, IPB University
Intern CIFOR-ICRAF Indonesia

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For Mr Erwin, Mrs Erwina and Mrs Resky, local food is more than just a slogan. Eating sweet potato from the home garden, picking vegetables and fruit straight from the tree, cooking fresh fish just caught from the river — these were all part of their childhood. Yet for some of their students, that experience feels foreign, gradually displaced by instant and processed foods. Now, through the classroom and the school grounds, children are learning that local food is an important part of their lives.

Landscape Alliance (the new operational name of CIFOR and ICRAF), through the Land4Lives action-research project with support from the Government of Canada, has built an initiative together with the National Food Agency and the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education to bring local food into the lives of the young generation through the Local Content Curriculum (Mulok) “Local Food for Climate Resilience”. The initiative introduces Diverse, Nutritionally Balanced and Safe (B2SA) food through learning experiences close to students’ everyday habits.

Through this curriculum, students are invited to recognise and understand various types of food, their nutritional value, how they are cultivated, how garden produce is processed, how processed foods are consumed, and how they can be marketed sustainably.

In developing the Local Food Mulok curriculum, Landscape Alliance acts as a technical facilitator and a bridge between parties. The process involves local governments and their agencies (OPD) — in this case, the local Education Office.

An awareness that grows slowly

Erwin Saputra observed that most students at SMAN 1 Talang Ubi, South Sumatra, know only fast food and foods that are going viral on social media. This is shaped by habits geared towards convenience and consumption patterns that rely on just one food commodity, so that knowledge of local food is beginning to fade.

Only a few of them know about local food, even though all its ingredients are available around their homes. “Well, these days most children only know about instant and fast food,” said Mr Erwin.

Since September 2025, when the local food Mulok was officially introduced, more than 900 students at SMAN 1 Talang Ubi, South Sumatra, have felt its benefits. The local food Mulok is applied across all levels — grades 10, 11 and 12 — with an approach tailored to each student’s learning phase.

For Mr Erwin, one of the most memorable moments of the local food Mulok is when students process food together. Students begin to realise that a single ingredient can be turned into many different preparations. Mr Erwin sees this local food-processing process as supporting the diversification of processed foods.

“For example, at our school we plant mustard greens or caisim in the botanical garden we have. When they are harvested and processed, students realise that mustard greens can be made into pudding, crisps, crackers, sponge cake and other dishes. This is fascinating, because I am happy when I see students amazed at the potential around them,” said Mr Erwin.

The impact of the learning is also beginning to be felt, especially as awareness of food increases. Students have become more open to eating vegetables and are starting to take an interest in growing vegetables at school and even at home. For Mr Erwin, the learning process also brings students to recognise and understand the local wisdom of their area.

“This food Mulok deepens the awareness and understanding of us as teachers, and of our students, about the local wisdom in our area that until now may have existed only in stories. The preparations we produce can become a hallmark of the school and the region, so that our branding reaches further,” said Mr Erwin.

Looking ahead, Mr Erwin hopes his school will not only cultivate plant-based food but also add animal-based food cultivation, one of them being fish. For Mr Erwin, this is an opportunity to introduce local food to students — one example being sagarurung. Sagarurung is a food preparation characteristic of the Penukal Abab Lematang Ilir area in South Sumatra, consisting of smoked and seasoned fish that produces a savoury taste with a distinctive smoky aroma.

Mr Erwin also added that there should be no hesitation in implementing this Mulok. As a teacher, the most important thing is to encourage the use of all available resources and potential as sources of learning for students. Teachers also have a duty to foster students’ readiness as a resilient young generation, prepared to face the future amid climate change, including the issue of food.

“Because, fundamentally, preserving food preparations is the key to food security,” he concluded.

Planting food memory from an early age

At SD GMIT Soe, East Nusa Tenggara, the local food Mulok has become a space for children to grow. Since it was officially introduced in June 2025 — after a development process that began in early 2024 — this learning has been experienced by more than 200 children in phase C (grades 5 and 6).

In front of the classroom, small garden beds have been prepared, and there the children plant legumes, green mustard, cucumber, maize and sweet potato. Meanwhile, in the back garden, students plant pumpkin and luang banana, which grow slowly with the seasons. Erwina Teloni, a teacher and member of the local food Mulok curriculum development team, said the garden has become a space for children to get to know their own food.

What is most memorable for Mrs Erwina — as her students call her — is the moment when the grade 5 and 6 children processed jagung bose (hulled maize): cleaning the whole maize, cooking it, and serving it on their own plates. The activity is simple, but rarely experienced by them, which makes it valuable. “They looked so excited when they ate the results of their own cooking,” she said.

This local food Mulok learning is in keeping with the spirit of the programme theme “my food, my culture”, which invites students to recognise local food as part of regional cultural diversity. That spirit has even spread to their homes. Many parents came to the school, bringing cameras and photographing their children cooking and enjoying the results of their preparations.

Mrs Erwina sees small changes that she is sure the children will remember. “What is taught to children when they are small will stay with them as they grow up and become very valuable knowledge for them,” said Mrs Erwina.

Now, the children realise that the food ingredients around them can be turned into dishes no less delicious than those they usually encounter. According to Mrs Erwina, the challenge in implementing this local food Mulok is maintaining consistency and commitment, so that the Mulok is not detached from the children’s stage of growth.

Mrs Erwina also hopes this local food Mulok can become a simple source of learning that serves children as they grow up — both for the world of work and for the environment in which they live.

The spirit of food security from the coast

The local food Mulok has grown out of the limited and unique space at SMPN 7 Watampone, South Sulawesi. The local food Mulok was piloted in late 2024, officially rolled out in full in 2025, and has now been experienced by more than 400 students. Because of limited land, food cultivation is not always carried out in the soil. Several short-cycle vegetables — such as chilli, mustard greens, aubergine and water spinach — are grown using a hydroponic system in a corner of the school. Another challenge that demands creativity from teachers and students is the school environment, which is close to swamp and coast.

When the planting season arrives and fairly heavy rain falls, the vegetables planted are usually flooded, so the harvest fails.

At SMPN 7 Watampone, this food Mulok is delivered in a unique way — as a co-curricular subject in a block system, over three full weeks without interruption from other subjects.

At school, students are given room to be creative in processing various local food ingredients — from sweet potato, pumpkin, breadfruit and banana to maize — into traditional preparations. One of these is barobbo, a maize dish mixed with vegetables that, for some students, is a food they had never encountered before.

Resky Januarty, a teacher and part of the local food Mulok development team, sees this lesson as having an impact not only on students but also on teachers and parents. “We have to learn again about plants, vegetables and animal-based food, including nutritional value, how to cook, and how to serve them,” said the woman commonly known as “Mrs Resky”.

Gradually, the impact of this food Mulok is becoming visible. Every Friday, students begin bringing breakfast that applies the B2SA principle. They even start commenting on each other’s packed meals when the food brought is short of protein, carbohydrates or vitamins.

For Mrs Resky, these small changes feel very valuable. Amid the onslaught of instant food, students are beginning to build a love for the local food culture of the place where they grow up. In the local food Mulok curriculum, the concept of diverse, nutritionally balanced and safe food is taught through concrete examples around them. This approach makes nutrition no longer feel complicated; nutrition appears in the form of food familiar to students’ daily lives.

Mrs Resky also hopes that this local food Mulok curriculum for climate resilience will one day be fully supported and applied more widely at the national level, with strong legal backing from the central government. She believes that schools such as SMPN 7 Watampone, together with other schools, can instil awareness of local food in Indonesia’s young generation.

The local food Mulok as a replication model

Landscape Alliance initiated the Local Food Mulok as part of the Sustainable Landscape for Climate Resilient Livelihood (Land4Lives) action-research project, carried out in the provinces of South Sulawesi, East Nusa Tenggara and South Sumatra. In the process, this curriculum was developed jointly with the Education Offices of Bone District (South Sulawesi), Timor Tengah Selatan (East Nusa Tenggara) and South Sumatra Province.

The collaboration between Landscape Alliance, local governments and the local Education Offices was carried out through seven steps in the process of developing the local food Mulok curriculum. These seven steps form an interconnected cycle, beginning with building shared understanding and commitment among all stakeholders as a fundamental step. The stages then continue through identifying needs and designing an appropriate curriculum, developing teaching materials, piloting in demonstration schools, collaborative evaluation, and finally reaching the stage of endorsement and large-scale implementation across the whole region.

As positive results emerged, the National Food Agency (Bapanas) became interested in promoting this local food Mulok as a model of good practice that can be replicated in other regions. Further cooperation was then realised through the publication of the Guide to Developing a Local Content Curriculum for B2SA Food Consumption Patterns and Local Food. This guide is adaptive and is not a standard curriculum, so it can serve as a reference for other local governments according to their needs.

Landscape Alliance is directly involved in developing the curriculum guide together with the National Food Agency, including in its dissemination to Education Offices and Food Security Offices across Indonesia. Along the way, the experience of Landscape Alliance’s three pilot provinces is presented as an example of good practice, so that other regions can replicate it and develop its content in line with the context of their own areas.

Now, the next task lies in the hands of local governments and other schools across Indonesia: to continue along the same path, so that more and more of the young generation grow up with food that is diverse, nutritious, safe, and rooted in their own homeland.

Originally published in Indonesian as “Pangan Lokal di Ruang Kelas: Menyemai Gizi dan Ketahanan Iklim Generasi Muda” on lahanuntukkehidupan.id.