Eat more plants
The University of Edinburgh has signed the Peas Please pledge to encourage students and staff to eat one extra portion of veg a day.
Why should we all eat more veg?
Government dietary guidance suggests we should be eating seven portions of fruit and veg a day, yet a recent report by the Food Foundation revealed that 80% of adults and 95.5% of children 11-16 years are not eating enough.
To decrease the risk of diet related diseases, we need to be eating, on average, one more portion of veg per day.
It’s not just our health that will benefit but the environment and farmers can potentially benefit from more veg too.
Research by the London School of Health and Tropical Medicine showed that if we all eat an extra portion of veg and a little less meat we would reduce the UK’s diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 17%.
What is Peas Please?
A trail-blazing initiative focused specifically on veg, Peas Please aims to bring together farmers, retailers, fast food and restaurant chains, caterers, processors and government departments with a common goal of making it easier for everyone to eat veg.
Our three commitments
Accommodation, Catering and Events (ACE) has made the following commitments:
We'll do this by:
- Increasing the number of vegetable side-serving options in our retail (hot food) outlets from one to two, which will give customers the option to add more servings and greater diversity of vegetables to their meals
- Adding more vegetable-based snack offerings in our grab n' go café outlets, in addition to existing options
- Increasing the number of vegetarian salad options in our grab n' go café outlets
- Increasing the number of servings of vegetables in our hot grab n' go items (paninis, bagels, burritos etc.)
In total, we will increase the weight of vegetables used per recipe (averaged across our catered student dining hall, retail outlets and grab n' go outlet recipes) from 90 grams to 150 grams per serving.
These include:
- Ensuring that 50% of meal options in all of our outlets are vegetarian or plant-based
- Selling crudité snack-packs in grab n' go outlets, which are very popular
- Allowing hot main meal customers to swap potatoes for other vegetables at no extra cost
- Always offering a vegan hot meal option in our retail outlets (and then increasing the number of veg side dishes from 1 to 2, as described above)
- All soups in our grab n' go and retail outlets are vegetarian or vegan
- Using seasonal and local vegetables on a rotational basis in our menus
Our catering team is producing cook-along videos for students who are self-isolating in self-catered halls. We aim to reach at least 300 students over the 2020/21 academic year.
Our catering team typically delivers in-person cooking workshops to 150 students each year.
When we are able to run these events again, we will increase the servings of vegetables that are used across our cooking workshop menus.
Read the original Peas Please news article
Blog posts and resources
Get inspired by these colourful recipes from the creators of the Planetary Health Diet [external]