Teachers get a lesson in food waste from Cheshire East

Teachers went back to the classroom to learn about the Love Food, Hate Waste campaign at an event at Crewe Alexandra Football Club.

Hosted by Let’s Get Cooking – a national network of cooking clubs for children, families and their communities – teachers and cooking-club supervisors got to grips with Cheshire East Council’s award-winning campaign in the form of a lesson on food waste and also a fun activity which involved making a smoothie.

The event was designed to help teachers to encourage children to get more involved with cooking and educate them on food waste.

Cheshire East hopes to take the Love Food, Hate Waste message into classrooms and educate children on the best ways to store food, make it last longer and to show what can be done with fruit that has gone a little squishy.

Councillor Rod Menlove, Cabinet member with responsibility for environmental services, said: “The Love Food, Hate Waste campaign has traditionally been aimed at adults but we think it is important that children get a good grounding in learning how to prevent food being unnecessarily thrown in the bin.

“We hope that children will now be taught about the best ways to store food to make it last longer and to show them how they can make meals out of fruit which is slightly past its best, for example.

“We will provide teachers with a resource pack filled with re-useable cards that can be used to educate children.”

Deborah Robb, Let’s Get Cooking regional training officer for the West Midlands, added: “This event was possible thanks to BIG Lottery funding and representatives from more than 60 schools attended who were keen to top up their skills and look at new resources to help them run cooking clubs.

“The Love Food, Hate Waste campaign is an excellent campaign and we were very keen to work with Cheshire East for this event.”

The activities were opened by Rob Rees MBE, known as The Cotswold Chef, who is also the chairman of the School Food Trust.

A number of other seminars took place throughout the day including ‘safe food cutting techniques for children’, ‘food hygiene’ and ‘setting up a garden in school’ which was run by the Food for Life partnership.

Sainsbury’s in Nantwich kindly donat