Assembly with an Eagle Twist

So, I did my first ever “Food Assembly” last week in front of 300 children! (Children may not sound scary, but when you are stood in a room full of these bright eyed, eager little faces waiting for a mystery person to talk– it is daunting, especially if you are not used to it)

What’s a Food Assembly – well it’s what it says on the tin, but we tend to do ours with a  bit of a twist.

See it coincides with the start of a school’s food service where the children have taken over… So last term we worked with the students and parents to develop brand new menus for that new service (and before you ask, yes, it does comply with the food standards and 23 out of the 30 dishes were chosen by the children).

We really want to get children excited about their new service and their new menus, so we make it super practical and visual for them to do that. We lay out a huge display of fruit and veg (with some really unusual ones that they may not be familiar with) so that they get an opportunity to see all the different colours and shapes. We then talk them through the purpose of those foods and get them thinking shapes colours, textures as well as trying things out.  

It’s such a great opportunity and we get a great chance to educate and enthuse the children… with the right messages and information about food. Funnily enough we ended up teaching the teachers a thing or two as well! 

As I was preparing, I remembered a few recent  news articles about misinformation about food that still exists even today among young people. Articles “Avocados come from ANIMALS' Kids’ shocking lack of food knowledge exposed’’… At least these students won’t fall foul of that problem.

The thing is, food education principles are easy to do, if you know how but through our work in supporting the School Food Plan, we discovered that there is such a varied knowledge base among teachers that they may not have the knowledge or confidence to give such information to others (when they may be struggling with this information themselves)

And this is something that we’ll be doing to ‘til the day we die people! (the eating bit is anyway!)

Children should be educated about food from a young age and there are so many fun ways to do this! The food assembly we offer to schools is just one of them. Demo’s, cookery classes, lessons projects, are just a few others. But it doesn’t take long to really make a difference.

I had a short time with 600 children that day and I know that each left the room with at least one new fact and a bucketful of enthusiasm. Lunchtime that day saw a dramatic uptake in veggies being asked for – because they knew WHY they should eat those things, not just that they should!

Imagine what you can do with consistent education and more time.

These sessions are important to ensure that children get to try new foods, understand what they are eating and even chose a better diet for themselves.

Getting them to interact by feeling different fruit and veg and smelling them is the first step in getting them interested and excited to try it in their food.

And it didn’t stop there…We wanted the students to use their creativity so we asked them whether they could come up with some different ideas on how to eat grapes. There were suggestions such as in a fruit salad, in smoothies etc… But we got them to think a step further and recommended ideas such as freezing grapes. Grapes have a high water content and do not fully freeze, so when they are hungry they can just take them out the freezer and have them with some yoghurt – a great nutritious snack! We also believed it was important to incorporate vitamins and minerals, RDA’s and why it is important to have you 5-a-day (more of the older students)

Because of the strong food messages that young people are bombarded with all the time, whether through junk food advertising, or the food morality police with their “clean eating”, “dirty food” labels, it’s really important that young people are given a balanced holistic approach to food leaving them confident in their ability to make the right choices and capable of doing so.

By taking a more cerebral approach to the messaging and explaining WHY they should eat what they are being asked to eat… it allows them to feel more ownership and control over these great food choices (which is never a bad thing when it comes to health and wellbeing)

And for all that learning and information- the children loved it. They were so excited to see and try the different foods. They enjoyed watching the headteacher have her first taste of a Sharon fruit (Yes, that’s an actual fruit that neither the students, teachers or head teacher had ever heard of before). And they were high-fiving the catering team at lunchtime who used some of the produce for lunch (benefits of an in house catering service!!)… We look forward to continuing to support the school to keep the children involved and educated about food. We have many things still to come in this bag of tricks, and we’ve already seen more vegetables being chosen and eaten this week as a result.  

We offer our Food Assemblies as part of a broader package as well as a standalone service. If you’d like to know more, drop me a line at shaira@eaglessl.co.uk  - in the meantime, please let us know the innovative and exciting ways you educate your young people about food. 

Shaira Mirpuri is a Business Development and Marketing Officer at Eagle Solutions Services and forms part of Team Eagle’s Fresher Files Blog Team

Eagle Solutions Services “Supports Excellent Education and Nutrition today, for a better tomorrow”

The Fresher Files is Team Eagle’s Blog which promotes our “Altogether Different Approach to Food”