Plenty Belize Assists School Feeding Program
By Lisa Wartinger, President

With funding provided by the Greenville Foundation, Plenty Belize is assisting parents, teachers and local and national representatives of Belize’s School Feeding Program (SFP), in their mission to provide a nutritious lunch during the school day to undernourished children. Via processing workshops and presentations and distribution of printed information, Plenty is enabling SFP representatives to include soy foods such as soy milk, pinole (a soy & corn cereal), and fritters made of soy, flour and seasonings, with lunch meals. In the Toledo District, where Plenty Belize is located, malnutrition is a high risk for Mayan children. SFP meals are currently served to over 485 undernourished students at nine schools in the Toledo District. Each of the participating schools is responsible for financing its own SFP costs, and volunteer parents do the cooking. Part of Plenty’s education work is to show how inexpensive it is to produce high-protein, nutritious soy foods. In Belize, 5 pounds of soybeans costs a little over $1.50. Soy food products made from this amount of beans will provide each of fifty students with 15 grams of high quality protein and other essential nutrients.

To ensure the program takes root, Plenty will offer a partial subsidization of the cost of beans to interested Toledo District SFP schools for a period of three months (through December ’01); provide continued technical assistance for the parents and teachers; and furnish kitchen tools (hand grinders, pots, and colanders) needed for soy processing by the schools. Joan Palma, the national School Feeding Program Administrator, participated in one recent presentation and is very interested in providing similar opportunities to other Belize schools participating in the SFP. She has asked Plenty to prepare an informational segment about soy foods and their incorporation into the SFP for Belize public radio.

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