Big plans to get kids food off the menu

Monday 09 January 2017

A local charity is hungry to get meals like burgers and chicken nuggets and chips off the menu in local pubs and restaurants and get children eating better when they go out.

Caring Cooks of Jersey want to see children offered the same tasty and nutritious meals as adults.

Caring Cooks for Jersey Founder Melissa Nobrega said: "We are planning on launching a campaign called Real Food for Kids Jersey, which is an initiative driven and owned by Caring Cooks and working in collaboration with partners across Jersey to deliver our vision.

"We are already working with a few local restaurants and caterers such as Compass and Flavour to take their food waste, and redivert it to families in need.  We only work with partners in this area who have the same ethos as we do, so no jarred sauces, only whole foods and fresh produce, and this has been really successful to date.

"I would really love to see caterers across the Island following the lead of the Liberation Group and the Calvani Group who don’t have kids menus, and offer half size portions of adult meals.  Why should kids just be offered the choice of chips, processed chicken nuggets and sugar loaded beans? – They should eat the same great food that we have in this Island and that is available to adults.

"We are hoping to work with butchers, farmers and fisherman to help our primary school children understand where food comes from and is grown as part of the offsite visits in the Kitchen Garden Project, and will try and use local growers wherever we can for the produce we use to teach cookery in the schools, and potentially in the future salad bars.

"We are hoping to work with the Co-Op and other retailers to highlight the healthier options available to families in store for lunch boxes, using the traffic light system or on shelf labelling.  I would like to see sweets and chocolate removed from checkouts or prominent instore areas, but there are wider implications around that and that is a longer term conversation.

"Doing more with local businesses, like we have done this year, where employers are offering their employees reduced cost or free places on our Community Cooking Programme to learn the skills to ditch convenience food and cook from scratch for their children and families.

2016 was a busy year for the charity that Mrs Nobrega set up nearly three years ago to support local families and help them make nutritious and tasty food part of daily life.

Caring Cooks signed a formal secondment agreement with Education and agreed with three Head Teachers to commit to one full day of food education per week in their schools.

Mrs Nobrega said it was an unprecedented and impactful step towards delivering their mission to Jersey’s primary school children.Working together they created working Kitchen Gardens, giving 629 children the chance to plant, grow and eat fruits and vegetables and learn how to prepare simple meals. The project is fully integrated in to the school’s timetable and links to the core curriculum subjects such as maths, science, literacy and geography. 

The charity plans to roll the project out to all States primary schools by 2025 and is one of its key priorities for the coming year. It has also taken on its first Food and Nutrition Co-ordinator who will start delivering formal Food Education lessons as part of the curriculum from next month.

Outside the classroom the charity's team of volunteers prepared and delivered over 3,500 meals last year to families in Jersey who were in crisis, either financially or through illness. Meanwhile 60 parents joined the charity's Community Cooking Programme and were given the confidence and skills to ditch processed food and start cooking their family meals from scratch.

Mrs Nobrega said: "We work very closely with the Health Improvement department and align with the States strategic plan, and will continue to do so, as we truly believe that education and collaboration will bring real social change, over the next 10 to 20 years, and we will hopefully see startling statistics like obesity rates in children reduce."