Encouraging public demand for sustainable, healthy plant protein products from intercrops - IntercropVALUES Practice Abstract

Summary

Eating legume-based foods enhances public health. Providing profitable outlets will encourage farmers to grow more intercropped legumes.
Practical recommendations
To increase demand for a category of plant protein, multiple actors need to change their habits—not only consumers, but also retailers, processors, and public kitchens.
One option for tackling this challenge is to organise so called food jams: cooking sessions in groups where participants are provided with clear instructions, ingredients, and equipment to prepare one or several meals according to prepared recipes.
Boosting public demand by spreading knowledge and providing hands-on instructions on how to pre-pare tasty legume meals from local ingredients will help farmers to sell their intercropped legume products.
In Sweden, the communication project Food Jams translated results from research to short movies, arti-cles, and recipes that explain the benefits of growing and eating legumes. The project also organised food jams for legume cooking, especially adapted to school kitchens, and produced instructions and material for others to also organise legume food jams.