Big Way Of Life

This month’s Spotlight Feature focuses on the Fit 4 Fun project in Carmarthenshire. The project ran a series of healthy eating cooking workshops at Ysgol Y Felin in which professional chef Hazel Thomas taught the children how to make a variety of healthy meals including pasta, pizzas and fruit smoothies.

At the beginning of every session a question and answer session took place regarding the food and meals that were going to be made that day. A discussion then took place about each ingredient and their nutritional value.

The children were then given their own workspace and made their own unique dish. They then took the dish home along with the recipe and various supporting literature on issues such as ‘5 a day’ and salt and sugar intake.

In the first lesson Hazel taught the children about sugar. She explained to them about hidden sugars in foods and that they might be consuming more sugar than they realise. She then helped them learn how to read food labelling to understand what is actually in their food.

The second lesson was all about salt and how little they should actually be having. Hazel then taught them how to start off a bread dough and they all made pizzas using fresh ingredients such as pineapple and sweetcorn.

Saturated fats were the focus of the third lesson and the children learned how to cut down the amount of saturated fat they have in their food. Hazel used Food Standards Agency information sheets to explain to the children where they will find saturated fats and then taught them how to make a fresh fruit couscous.

The children were encouraged to taste all the different fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds so that they could discover new flavours and quite possibly try some foods for the first time.

The final cooking workshop was on healthy sweets. The children were shown how to make healthy sweets using dried fruits and seeds and also healthy chocolate crispies using plain chocolate and cereal that has reduced sugar and salt. They then watched a Food Standards Agency DVD on how to develop a healthy eating and cooking lifestyle.

There was then a further workshop on food hygiene which covered topics such as cross contamination and what foods can easily breed bacteria. Hazel then provided all the children with handouts full of information and she even gave them all cookery books provided by Carmarthenshire County Council following their Love Food Hate Waste campaign.

Hazel was thrilled by the reception she got from the children and hoped they had learned important lessons to take with them as they grow up.

She said: “The response has been absolutely amazing at both schools and the teachers at both schools have commented on how much the children have changed over the weeks. They discuss the sessions all the time and really look forward to the next cooking session.

I would like to think that the format and approach that I use will be adopted by the schools once my work is completed and that the school will continue to encourage children to look at food in a different way. Eating to live instead of living to eat.”

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