- Date
- 16th April 2026
- Categories
- eCooking, Institutional Cooking
By Dr Yesmeen Khalifa (Loughborough University), Jacob Fodio Todd (Gamos Ltd.) and Professor Matt Leach (Gamos Ltd.).
After attending the launch event for the Special Collection on planet-friendly school meals in The Lancet Planetary Health journal, School meals: Improving child health and leveraging food systems transformation, co-hosted by the Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition and the Centre on Climate Change & Planetary Health, we left with a broader understanding of the educational, economic, environmental, nutritional, and social impacts of school meals. The event was framed around a simple but powerful proposition: school meals can offer benefits that go beyond children’s nutrition. They can help shape healthier futures, support sustainable food systems, and accelerate progress towards net zero. Listening to presentations on agrobiodiversity, holistic food education, climate-resilient agriculture, alongside our presentation on the sustainability benefits of eCooking transitions in schools [1–6], we found ourselves reflecting on one question in particular: if school food systems are expected to change under climate pressure, can the cooking technologies used in schools keep up?
The school meals literature increasingly argues that these programmes are not just feeding interventions but platforms for wider food systems transformation. Planet-friendly school meals are being presented as a way to improve children’s diets while also changing procurement, farming, food waste, education, and infrastructure [3,7]. In that framing, school kitchens are not peripheral. They sit at the centre of the transition of multiple interconnected systems.
That matters because climate change will not only affect yields and harvest stability. It will also change the types of crops that are available, affordable, and desirable for school meals. The papers in this collection repeatedly call for more diverse, climate-resilient, locally relevant, and agrobiodiverse school food baskets, including greater use of legumes, whole grains, indigenous foods, and crops better suited to drought, flooding, and ecological stress. If that crop basket changes, then the dishes served in schools will change as well. And if dishes change, so too will the ways they need to be cooked, the time that takes, the amount of water and energy needed, and the size of pots required. The growing interest in African Indigenous Vegetables illustrates this clearly, as it shows that a shift toward more local, nutrient-dense, and climate-resilient ingredients brings different preparation methods, cooking times, and processing demands.
This is why we think that eCooking debate in schools needs to move beyond a straightforward fuel switch. It is not enough to ask whether electricity is cleaner than firewood, or whether EPC cooking is cheaper than using LPG. Those are important questions, and the existing evidence gives clear and positive answers. But an additional question is whether eCooking technologies are being designed for the food systems we are moving into, rather than the ones we are leaving behind? In other words, can they cope with and adapt to a climate-changing crop basket?
We have started to address this through studies such as our contribution to the Special Collection. This journal paper gives a multi-country, multi-context study of eCooking transitions in schools focusing explicitly on findings from empirical studies of school cooking. The study draws on case studies from Kenya, Lesotho, Guinea, and Nepal to understand how local context shapes cooking performance and energy use. The supplementary appendix makes this even clearer by describing the use of Controlled Cooking Tests and cooking diaries. Controlled Cooking Tests compare how a stove performs against traditional methods for preparing a local meal, while cooking diaries record what is cooked, how it is cooked, how long it takes, and how much energy each dish uses. That is exactly the kind of grounded evidence needed for institutional cooking transitions. Studies like these form the basis for subsequent methodologies designed explicitly for schools, such as MECS’ recently developed School Kitchen and Cooking Study protocol (SKACS). SKACS draws conceptually on these established approaches to gather robust and standardised data on energy use and cooking practice in these settings.
The Lesotho case study is a particularly strong example of this contextual approach. Rather than treating eCooking as a generic technology rollout, the study looked closely at dish-level practices, school-level differences, number of appliances, wiring upgrades, quality of power, and the lived experience of cooks and teachers. It found that large electric pressure cookers were compatible with existing diets and cooking practices across five schools, while also reducing fuel costs and cooking time. But the value of the study lies not only in the positive outcome. It lies in the fact that it examined cooking as it happens in specific schools, with specific dishes, under specific institutional conditions.
The Kenya case study shows why this matters. In this case study, the EPCs delivered major benefits for some dishes and contexts, including substantial fuel savings and cleaner kitchens, but the suitability of the technology depended heavily on the type of dishes being cooked and the scale of meal provision. In some schools, dishes such as ugali and porridge could not easily be prepared for school meals because of appliance size limitations. In schools with a large number of students, EPCs were sometimes more practical for staff meals than for the main school meals. This is not a failure of eCooking. It is a reminder that cooking technologies must match the cooking needs, and that those needs may change over time.
That is where the next stage of research and innovation needs to go. The current evidence base is already starting to generate good evidence on the present-day contextual fit. The next challenge is future adaptability. If climate-resilient school meals begin to rely more on millets, sorghum, legumes, indigenous vegetables, aquatic foods, or other locally adapted crops, then cooking technologies need to be tested against those ingredients before they become standard school menu items, not after. Some future crops will be well suited to pressure cooking. Others may need soaking, batch boiling, constant stirring, or different heat profiles. Menu transformation, crop transformation, and appliance design cannot be treated as separate conversations. Cooks will need to be placed at the centre of all these developments.
This also means that adaptability is not just about the stove itself. It is about the wider school cooking system: wiring, voltage stability, appliance sizing, kitchen workflow, refrigeration, water access, storage, and backup arrangements. The school meals framework in the collection explicitly links clean cooking to resilient school infrastructure and broader sustainability goals [3]. So, the design question is not only “Which appliance is most efficient?” but “What kind of eCooking system can remain useful as crops, dishes, and school food policies evolve?”
The most important lesson we took from the event is that eCooking for schools should be designed to cope with and adapt to these changing conditions. Meeting that challenge will require deeper interchange between those approaching school feeding from different perspectives. Researchers focusing on school cooking need to engage more with the directions of climate-friendly diets and agricultural change, while those working on sustainable diets and food systems need to bring school cooking more fully into their frameworks. This is fundamentally a transdisciplinary challenge, requiring collaboration across research, policy, practice, and technology design, while keeping cooks and school realities at the centre. Current studies have already provided useful starting tools — cooking diaries, Controlled Cooking Tests, comparative case studies, and dish-level analysis. The next step is to use those tools to ensure that eCooking remains compatible with transforming food systems.
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References
[1] Khalifa Y, Leach M, Sieff R, Nsengiyaremye J, Onjala B, Groen K, et al. The role of electric cooking in providing sustainable school meals in low-income and lower-middle-income countries. Lancet Planet Health 2025. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(25)00004-X
[2] Estrada-Carmona N, van Houtert MM, Araujo de Lima S, Fauchon P, Hunter D, Jones SK, et al. Mainstreaming agrobiodiversity in planet-friendly school meals for children: a scoping review. Lancet Planet Health 2025;9:101374. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanplh.2025.101374
[3] Pastorino S, Backlund U, Bellanca R, Hunter D, Kaljonen M, Singh S, et al. Planet-friendly school meals: opportunities to improve children’s health and leverage change in food systems. Lancet Planet Health 2025;9:101181. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(24)00302-4
[4] Springmann M, Hansoge MP, Schultz L, Pastorino S, Bundy DAP. The health, environmental, and cost implications of providing healthy and sustainable school meals for every child by 2030: a global modelling study. Lancet Planet Health 2025;9:101278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanplh.2025.06.002
[5] Singh S, Jordan I, Hunter D, Milani P, Muthoni P, Borelli T. Promoting climate-resilient agriculture and food security through school feeding. Lancet Planet Health 2026;10:101414. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanplh.2025.101414
[6] The Lancet Planetary Health. Dietary schooling. Lancet Planet Health 2025;9:101410. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanplh.2025.101410
[7] Pastorino S, Hughes D, Schultz L, Owen S, Morris K, Backlund U, et al. White Paper: School meals and food systems: Rethinking the consequences for climate, environment, biodiversity, and food sovereignty. 2023. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.17037/PUBS.04671492
Image Credit: Featured image in this blog is AI generated using ChatGPT.
AI Disclaimer: AI tools were used to support the structure of this blog, with all content refined and authored by a human.