Tanzania's innovative approach to school meals offers valuable lessons for India.
By improving recipes and educating students, Tanzania has successfully shifted perceptions, making these nutritious foods more appealing.
This strategy highlights the importance of cultural acceptance and education in promoting climate-smart diets.
By mid-morning, the lunch bell rings at Babati Secondary School and children line up for a meal of finger millet porridge and rich pigeon pea stew served over rice.
These foods were once dismissed by many in Tanzania as unpleasant or old-fashioned. But in the town of Babati, such meals are gaining acceptance as part of efforts to improve nutrition and encourage more diverse diets.
“Honestly, we used to see finger millet porridge as something for little kids or poor families back in the village,” said Neema John, 16. “But now we really like it. When they don’t make it, we complain. It fills you up and gives you energy.”
The growing acceptance of these meals reflects a wider challenge confronting countries across the Global South: How to feed children better at a time when climate shocks, rising food prices and stubborn malnutrition are putting increasing pressure on food systems.
In Babati, one response is taking shape through school meals built around resilient local crops that can better withstand hotter and drier conditions, while also creating a steadier market for the farmers who grow them.
For India, the parallels are hard to miss. The country is a major producer and consumer of pigeon pea, known locally as tur or arhar, and one of the world’s largest producers of finger millet or ragi. In recent years, it has promoted millets as climate-smart crops and part of a more resilient food system. But Tanzania’s experience highlights a familiar problem: Crops praised in policy speeches and public campaigns do not automatically become foods children want to eat.
A 2020 study conducted in four schools in Dodoma and Manyara regions found that even a modest food education campaign could significantly change how students perceived pigeon pea and finger millet. Researchers worked with 2,822 students, along with cooks and teachers, to improve recipes, explain the crops’ nutritional value and allow students to taste and rate the meals themselves.
Negative perceptions fell by 70.3 per cent for pigeon pea and 79.5 per cent for finger millet. Fifteen months later, more than 95 per cent of students said they wanted the dishes to remain on school menus, suggesting that acceptance of climate-resilient foods can grow quickly when schools prepare them well and make them part of daily life.
“The change was quite surprising,” said Marieta Laizer, a teacher involved in school feeding activities in Manyara Region. “I could hardly imagine that students who once complained about the smell, the colour and even the texture would begin accepting the improved meals.”
The findings matter because school meals do more than fill stomachs. They help shape children’s tastes, eating habits and perceptions of food. In doing so, they influence which foods are valued and which crops communities come to see as modern, desirable and worth growing.
The study, conducted by researchers from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics and their partners, took place in pigeon pea-growing areas of Dodoma and Manyara. In schools where menus typically revolved around maize porridge, ugali, rice and beans, researchers introduced improved recipes using pigeon pea and finger millet and tested whether better preparation and food education could shift how students viewed the crops.
Students, teachers, parents and cooks were brought into the process, learning about nutrition, encountering the crops through “Smart Food” messaging, and judging the meals by taste, smell and texture. The result was greater acceptance of the dishes and a gradual erosion of the stigma that had surrounded them for years.
“Children do not reject food because they don’t understand nutrition,” said January Dalushi, a nutrition officer in Manyara. “They often reject it because of how it is cooked and what they have been taught to believe about it. Once you change that perception, you can begin to change their eating habits.”
In both Tanzania and India, food systems have long reflected social ideas about status and modernity. Refined grains and familiar staples dominate, while hardy traditional crops are often dismissed as foods of poverty, drought or rural hardship.
Pigeon pea remains a common dal in India, and finger millet still features in some regional diets, but consumption is uneven and school meals do not always match official support for more diverse, climate-resilient foods.
India’s Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman programme is among the world’s largest school feeding schemes, serving millions of children in government and aided schools. But scale does not necessarily deliver dietary diversity.
Tanzania’s experience suggests that adding climate-resilient foods to school meals is not only a matter of supply or subsidy. It also depends on education, preparation and cultural acceptance.
Tanzania’s approach worked because rather than lecturing children into healthier eating, it made the meals more appealing, trained cooks to prepare them properly and gave students the chance to discover that these foods could be enjoyable.
“When we changed the recipe and added coconut milk, onions and tomatoes, the students noticed the difference immediately,” said Michaela Mujuni, a school cook at Babati. “Before, they would leave the food. Now they come back and ask, ‘Mama, can I have a little more stew?’”
Much of India’s millet revival has been driven by national campaigns, wellness trends and official promotion. But messaging alone does not always change what children eat at school each day, nor does it create stable demand for smallholder farmers unless procurement systems include those crops.
Pigeon pea provides protein, is drought-tolerant and helps improve soil fertility. Finger millet is a hardy cereal valued for nutrients including calcium and iron. Together, they can raise the nutritional value of cereal-heavy school meals, especially for adolescents who need more iron, calcium and protein during growth.
That matters in both countries. Tanzania still faces multiple forms of malnutrition, including stunting, poor dietary diversity and micronutrient deficiencies, particularly in rural and low-income households. India, despite decades of economic growth and strong grain production, still carries one of the world’s heaviest burdens of child undernutrition and anaemia.
“We cannot talk about climate resilience without talking about what children eat,” said Thomas Bwana, a researcher at the Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute. “These crops are already adapted to our conditions. The challenge is to make them liked on the plate.”
India has long been a major buyer of Tanzanian pigeon pea. But the relationship has also exposed the risks of dependence. When India tightened imports in 2017 following strong domestic production, Tanzanian farmers were left with surplus stocks and falling prices. The episode showed how vulnerable export-led crop systems can be without a stronger domestic market. “When schools buy these crops regularly, they create confidence for farmers,” said Bwana.
The Tanzanian study’s most powerful finding may have been the durability of that change. Fifteen months after the intervention ended, schools were still serving the dishes and students still wanted them. That matters because development projects often produce enthusiasm that fades once the pilot phase ends. In this case, the shift appeared to last because it changed both routine and perception.
India’s school meals system, because it is permanent rather than project-based, is well placed to produce similarly durable changes. But doing so would require treating school meals as spaces of social learning, not merely instruments of nutrition delivery.