From Reigniting an Interest in Local Food by Danielle Nierenberg:

After journalism school in Senegal, Seck Madieng worked for the government. But he wanted to do “something real. I didn’t want to be a bureaucrat.” He left his job and started AgriInfos, the only Senegalese newspaper to focus entirely on agriculture, food, and healthy diets. “I’m interested in going into villages, talking to farmers, seeing how they work, how they eat. I’m trying to understand why they are poor and why they are hungry,” says Madieng.

In 2007, Madieng, along with local chef Bineta Diallo, started the Mangeons Local (Eat Locally) project in two schools in Dakar. Their goals? To teach students how foods were made and who grew and prepared them. Most urban residents in Dakar depend on foods made not in Senegal, but from Europe.
But their lessons aren’t just theoretical, they also teach students how to cook. According to Diallo, for many students it’s the first time some students have ever prepared or cooked food. Instead of baguettes and imported canned foods, the children are learning how to cook cereals and grains, including local rice varieties, fonio (a small grain typically used in couscous), millet, and sorghum. And rather than drinking milk out of boxes imported from Amsterdam, they’re learning how good local milk can taste, as well as all of the things that can be made from dairy products, including crème, cheese, and butter.

Children are the best communication vehicles to parents, according to Madieng and Diallo. They bring the skills they learn at school home, helping to improve their families’ diets. Mangeons Local also celebrates at the end of the school year with a big party highlighting local foods that parents, students, teachers, and the community can all attend. In addition to local food and juices, they play music from Senegalese musicians and singers, including Grammy winner Youssou N’Dour and Ismael Lo, and Bill Yiakhou, who all sing about agriculture.

Mangeons Local gets some support from Slow Food International, but all the staff are volunteers, which limits the number of schools who can participate in the program.

Original article by Danielle Nierenberg.

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An article of interest for people in the local food production/ relocalisation area:
Forte, M. (2008). Knowledge, Food and Place. A Way of Producing, a Way of Knowing. Sociologica Ruralis. 48(3): 200-222.

Abstract
This article examines the dynamics of knowledge in the valorisation of local food, drawing on the results from the CORASON project (A ‘cognitive approach to rural sustainable development the dynamics of expert and lay knowledge’). It is based on the analysis of several in-depth case studies on food relocalisation carried out in 10 European countries (Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, Germany, Norway, Poland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Greece). In the different fields of rural studies (rural sociology, geography, anthropology) there is currently a wide debate about the relocalisation of food production and consumption.

Born out of a critique of the ‘conventionalisation’ of organic agriculture, attention to local food has grown in recent years to assume the features of a new orthodoxy or paradigm that is now undergoing, as is suitable to any orthodoxy, deep and critical scrutiny. Many points are discussed, from the definition of ‘local’ to its transformative role in the current agri-food system and rural community, whether relocalisation of food is a sustainable strategy and whether its character is radical or merely reformist. The perspective adopted here, which is relatively neglected in the literature, derives from the overall focus of CORASON on the role of knowledge in rural development. We look at the valorisation of local food as a knowledge-based practice that mobilises the various forms of knowledge embodied in both rural and non-rural actors. Following knowledge in the valorisation of food leads us to differentiate between patterns of food relocalisation across Europe and to analyse the interplay among knowledge forms and actors in the contested construction of the local food project.

The study was undertaken as part of the European Commission’s CORASON project whose goal is to ‘identify and explain the dynamics of the variety of knowledge forms used in rural projects relevant to rural economic development, rural civil society, and the protection of rural nature.’ See: www.corason.hu for more.

You can download various publications / working papers from the Corason website – in addition you might like to have a look through the special Issue of Sociologia Ruralis (the one in which the Fonte article is published) http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120083630/ issue  as this one presents the various outputs of the Corason project.