Oz Harvest - FEAST Program: 2026 Behaviour Change and Education Finalist

OZHarvest's FEAST program has a simple pitch to Victorian schools: come cook with the food that was about to be thrown out.

Over 7 to 10 weeks, mapped to the Victorian curriculum, students in Years 5 to 8 learn why a third of Australia's food is wasted, then do something about it, cooking Use It Up recipes from ingredients at risk of landfill. It's free for every school, with kitchen kits and grocery vouchers prioritised for regional and low-SES schools where food insecurity bites hardest.

In two years, FEAST Victoria has run 347 programs, reached 19,314 students and trained 350 teachers, from Mallacoota to Mildura, more than doubling in size between 2024 and 2025. At Ellinbank Primary in Gippsland, which has no kitchen, all 31 students cook weekly at classroom stations. At Mooroopna Primary near Shepparton, 98% of Year 6s want to do it again, and willingness to eat "ugly" produce climbed from six in ten students to nine in ten.

The program isn't just measured by attendance. Monash University's BehaviourWorks Australia independently evaluated FEAST and called it best practice, tracking real change in matched pre and post surveys: cooking confidence up, vegetable and fruit intake up, more students checking the fridge for food that needs using.

FEAST's X-factor is blunt: students eat their homework. Most food education asks kids to imagine a problem. FEAST hands them the actual surplus food and lets them solve it, with their own hands, in their own classroom.

See all the finalists here: https://www.kabvic.org.au/post/meet-the-2026-tidy-towns-and-cities-sustainability-awards-finalists

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