Food etc
Food etc and School Food Matters bring veg gardens and cooking to Bedford primary schools

Food etc

We are passionate about empowering everyone from school children and their parents, to adult community groups to make better food choices by equipping them with the knowledge and skills they need to be able to shop, cook and eat more healthily and cheaply.

We work in partnership with School Food Matters to bring their Young Marketeers programme to primary schools. Children learn about local and environmental impacts of food, grow their own vegetables, engage in food marketing, and sell their harvests at their community market. And they learn with their parents how to cook what they have grown to make tasty, inexpensive and nutritious meals.

Benefits include:

• Time together uninterrupted by other people or phones

• Improving confidence through learning new skills

• Encouraging adults and children to try new foods and activities increases their willingness to try other things together that they wouldn’t usually

• Bringing in hard to reach people. For example schools have told us that some parents who have attended our courses with their children have not previously engaged in other ways

• Increasing family cohesion

• Better behaviour and study results from better fed children

• Teaching children practical fine motor and numeracy skills