Students were set a brief to develop a faster, fresher, healthier takeaway based on an analysis of a traditional recipe.
Real food, real fast
Transcript
Judi Delbridge: The year 9 foods programme is called Real Food, Real Fast and it’s based on The Food Truck – Michael Van de Elzen’s TV programme, The Food Truck. We chose that context because it’s really, really important to engage the students in something that they really get their teeth into, and if it’s current, and it’s trending at the moment, and it’s got good bones, and the idea has got sound nutritional and sound skill-based things, you know it’s just a neat way of doing it.
It’s a programme that a lot of families watched and a lot of students really, really enjoyed, and Michael being such a sunny personality, I really liked that idea. What we were trying to target was a little bit of a health issue too, working with the health curriculum, and we were looking at the obesity issues.
So we started with some newspaper articles and we were looking at how we could be thinking about, you know, good nutritious food and making some really good healthy choices. We also wanted to bring in the seasonal, use of seasonal vegetables and local produce.
So the girls worked through quite a few functional modelling situations where they had to work out the performance properties, what was in a particular dish, they had to dissect it, pull it apart. We watched several of Michael’s episodes and then we trialled several of his recipes from the My Food Truck book.
The girls then were set a brief where they were to develop a faster, fresher, healthier takeaway based on a traditional recipe. So they trialled a traditional takeaway, analysed it, and then modified and came up with a better choice.
They then came up with several concepts, they surveyed their market, and at this school it was the junior high school, so they surveyed 30 students between years 7 and 10, which helped them decide on their final concept which they have then tested and trialled. And now they are going to produce a dozen portions of that, packaged in sustainable packaging etc to be sold at a big market day out.
The girls all knew Michael van der Elzen and thought that it was fabulous and they’ve just totally embraced it, so we’ve got some absolutely amazing new products that have been developed over the course of the last six weeks, which will sell at the market.
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