Grown in the community

Aim - to improve nutrition in children.

Participants:

Local Primary Schools

Part 1: - Edible Explorers

This is to teach year six children how to cook and how to eat healthily. It is to be fun and also educational, delivered in weekly lessons of 1.5hours to 30 children at a time with a different theme each session.

8 week blocks once per year per school.

A teacher with food expertise will teach the children exactly what ingredients to use, with recipe cards. Children are able to take home the food they have prepared at the end of the session to cook at home with their families.

The programme emphasises cookery on a budget, reducing food waste in the fridge and in the cupboards, augmenting the important ingredients to make them go further such as pulses with meat, realistic recipes, life skills from birth and beyond, and encouraging families to cook and eat together.

Background

The importance of good nutrition to health has been well documented for a long time, as have the detrimental effects of the wrong food including their constituent parts, effects on the body and obesity.
There is a perception that skills in producing, and preparing food are less than they used to be. Over 60% of people don’t prepare a meal from ingredients on a regular basis (Burnley health behaviours and lifestyle findings).
As well as cooking, nutrition and fun, the sessions provide after school activities, new vocabulary, mathematics practice when counting up ingredients and also inspiration.

Healthy Selfies

For a bit of fun, and as part of monitoring, we ask that people send in a selfie of themselves cooking the food they have prepared at school, whilst they are at home with their families. We can present these photos as a collage on the school’s website.

Cookbooks

Each child takes recipes home to encourage them to cook with their families. I would like these recipes to form the basis for a book with recipes in, following a theme of two explorers, a boy and a girl. This book will be made available to all children.

I would like to ask my older patients to help write this.

Part 2: Planting

Through partnership with Pennine Community Farms, teach the children how to plant food, which soil to use, how to look after the soil, when to plant, and how to water. Ultimately, this is something they can use to cook with. It may be that cooking this food will have to take place during the harvest in the Summer holidays.

Gardening books

Each session to be captured. In the end we can utilise the knowledge we have in our community to augment this in the form of a book for children, presenting the essentials. Everyone will have ownership in it.

Information will be plants, environment, nutritional value of different food, when to harvest, what a range of plants and trees are called etc. Also the life cycle.