Saberes e sabores da infância: oficina culinárias como princípios de educação alimentar e nutricional da educação infantil.

Abstract

In Brazil, the prevalence of overweight and obesity has increased over the years: 7.5% of children in the Northeast were overweight in 1989, in 2008-2009 this number increased to 26%.One of the public health intervention strategies for this scenario comes from the Food and Nutrition Education (FNE), and among its principles the culinary workshops has great importance for providing reflection, autonomy, creativity, valuing the act of cooking. Thus, this study aimed to evaluate interventions to promote healthy eating in a day care center in the city of Cuité / PB, taking cooking classes as a principle of food and nutritional education. The work was divided into three steps: (1) diagnosis; (2) intervention and (3) assessment. For data collection semi-structured interviews were conducted (with mothers and daycare workers), dynamic, observational study and image registration (children's nursery). Verbal data were analyzed by content analysis, and visual data according to the proposal of semiotic analysis. The diagnosis found three main problems that interfere in a proper and healthy eating in the school environment: (1) low availability of healthy food at school, (2) tasting habits in the household, and (3) food monotony, consequently led to low acceptability by children. So it was decided to promote oriented actions to problems, taking the culinary workshops as a principle, and the target audience chosen to do so were the employees of the nursery. The workshops were evaluated by TALP method and analyzed by content analysis, which showed satisfactory results. Educational activities, with emphasis on practical cooking aroused the participants the importance of working FNE in their day-by-day work, as well as understand its importance as a disseminator role of knowledge and encouragement, and has aroused pleasure cooking, motivating them to new findings.