Mainstreaming agrobiodiversity in planet-friendly school meals for children: a scoping review

The global shift away from healthy, diverse, and sustainable diets threatens children's health and futures. Although school gardens and home-grown school feeding can reconnect children with nutritious, sustainably produced food, these interventions are often implemented separately and with little attention to agrobiodiversity, which is a cornerstone for sustainability and healthy diets. Via a scoping review of 124 articles from 35 countries, we identified wide-ranging and complementary benefits of these interventions beyond health and education. The benchmark of the species used in these interventions against cultivated, predicted, and listed edible plants shows that agrobiodiversity is underused. Despite fragmented and incomplete evidence, our research shows that these interventions can jointly drive profound transformation. Realising this potential demands systemic shifts toward holistic, rights-based approaches that overcome surmountable barriers and build objective, sustainable, and resilient food systems delivering planet-friendly school meals.