Education and Agriculture ministries may deal

Georgia’s Minister of Education, Aleksandre Jejelava, who quite often attracts media interest with his extraordinary statements and modern views about education and upbringings, says he dreams about introducing healthy food to schools.

The Minister says his body is in communication with the Ministry of Agriculture about providing secondary education institutions with healthy products.

Jejelava said this while commenting on the availability of fruit and vegetables at school: “It was in one of the Scandinavian countries, maybe in Sweden. There was a bowl at the entrance of the school with apples…if you want you can eat the fruit, if not, no…but in the end most children ate it,” the Minister says.

The Education Ministry has already announced that a list of the junk food that will be prohibited at schools has already been drawn up.

Meanwhile, the Minister does not exclude the possibility that after prohibiting unhealthy snacks, food at schools may get more expensive.

To address this, Jejelava advised parents to make healthy sandwiches at home and give them to their children with fruit to eat at schools.

It is of course a good thing that unhealthy foods will no longer be sold at schools and that schools may have healthy fruit and vegetable in the future.

However, prices must remain available at schools, as otherwise the children may continue to buy cheaper, unhealthy products from nearby shops.

The prohibition of unhealthy food may partially settle the problem of avoiding future, health-related complications in the younger generations.

However, the government still needs to provide strict food controls.

Unhealthy and genetically modified food is still being sold in Georgia as healthy food, and without relevant indications they are unhealthy, and both the old and the young continue to buy and eat unhealthy products.