Food for our future kids’ activities

Tales from the Compost Heap (Episode 1)

Environmental chefs here’s a recipe for you……

Apple Cores, Bananas, Bruised, coffee grounds with filters, used. Just add to the pot….

Join us tucked away from the busy road for a story…. (with a pinch of learning too!)

Tales from the Compost Heap (Episode 2)

Ellie tells us all about compost and why it is so important to our planet..then we delve to the compost pile to meet Woody the Woodlouse and Cedric the Centipede!

Fight food waste with your packed lunch

Here are some tips to ensure school lunches are eaten and do not end up in the bin!

• Buy a lunch box with compartments or pack food in boxes/ containers rather than bags. This will stop foods from getting squashed and crushed which often leads to wastage, you also won’t need to use cling film or foil!
• Keep an eye on what is regularly coming home uneaten. If certain foods are regularly coming home uneaten and being binned, be ready to adapt and try something different! You can also offer uneaten foods as a snack after school.
• Reuse leftovers like pasta from dinner in packed lunches the next day. This will make sure leftover food gets eaten up and also offers a nice change from sandwiches!
• Give your kids a choice! Give them two choices for their packed lunch. If children are able to choose, they’re more likely to pick what they enjoy and eat it all up.
• Freeze certain foods. Did you know yoghurts can be frozen to make them last longer and you can butter frozen bread to make a sandwich? They’ll be defrosted by lunch time!

Stop the frightening Halloween food waste!

Halloween really is a scary time when you realise just how many pumpkins are thrown away. In the UK, a whopping 18,000 tonnes of pumpkin are thrown away each year and the vast majority of this goes to landfill rather than for composting!
Get the kids involved and eat your pumpkin this autumn. Delicious recipes to try include:

• Pumpkin and raisin loaf
• Peanut butter and pumpkin biscuits
• Pumpkin skin crisps
• Pumpkin houmous
• Pumpkin pie s’mores
• Halloween pumpkin cake

More pumpkin recipes for kids’ inspiration can be found here.

Get involved in the family meal planning!

The fight against food waste really is one for the whole family, not just the adults.
Introduce your children to issues like food waste when they are young and build healthy, sustainable food habits for life!

• Get the kids to scope out the fridge, cupboards and freezer and help make a meal plan for the week ahead using our weekly meal planner. This way they can suggest the meals they would like to have that week and when you go shopping they can have the task of ticking things off the list!
• Spend half an hour to an hour with the kids making a list of all the meals you have in the freezer. When you come to meal planning, make sure to use one of these up each week!
• Have a shopping list in the kitchen where it is the kids’ job to add something to the list if you run out. This will make it a lot easier when you come to write your weekly shopping list.