News from Foods

This week in Foods the Year 12s have continued their unit exploring sustainable food practices. We went foraging in the green belt and learnt about some indigenous plants that can be eaten and some that were used for medicinal purposes by Māori. We also came across some banana passion fruit, apples and carbohydrate dense koru just 100m away from school! 

On Wednesday we went a bit further afield on our foraging mission and visited the Otago Polytechnic, where we were shown around by Lisa Burton, programme manager for horticulture. Lisa introduced us to the Living Campus, where all are welcome to gather food and reconnect with nature. We even took a whirl at the composting systems and learnt about worm farms and putting nutrients back into the soil rather than into landfill.

The Year 13s created a useful resource to educate fellow ākonga about the amount of sugar in sugar sweetened beverages. The posters have been a great topic of conversation in the hallway and certainly are eye-opening. Apart from sampling sugary drinks (for educational and poster building purposes), we are also playing with making "food for flatting" and cooking from scratch. 

Today we made wraps and hummus from scratch saving on packaging waste. The food scraps are now being contributed to a bokashi system (anaerobic composting) where they will eventually end up as essential plant nutrients for some lucky garden!

The Year 11s finished off their Food Safety unit, making chicken stir fry. We made sure to cook our chicken properly, use separate utensils and clean surfaces afterwards!