Students in the hospitality program at St. James Catholic High School here have developed new healthy and locally-sourced breakfast club products for the board.
On Dec. 4, St. James revealed 10 new recipes, developed by hospitality students, that school breakfast clubs can purchase to replace the foods they may currently purchase at grocery stores.
More than 200 Grade 6 students from across the Wellington Catholic District School Board came to St. James to test out and learn about the recipes and sustainable food.
One of the teachers leading the program is Mary Kay Weiler, who said she wanted to provide options for those doing the purchasing for breakfast programs.
“Somebody would be in charge of their breakfast program; they go out and they purchase items that they can give kids that have shown up without breakfast,” Weiler explained.
“So like your apple sauce, your granola bars, muffins, and they bring them back to the school and sometimes these are not always very nutritious, so our idea was to try to develop 10 items that instead of these schools going to the grocery stores to purchase these items, they could get them from our catering program here at St. James.”
Weiler said the recipes all feature local and sustainable food sources so the menu offerings may fluctuate throughout the year in order to use the local products available at the time.
Apple sauce, for instance, will be a staple because Ontario apples are available all year.
“Then in the spring…maybe we’ll do our fruit purees, like strawberries, when they’re in season,” Weiler explained.
To help fund the development process, Weiler said the school received $15,000 in Food Challenge funding from the Greenbelt Fund, which supports the viability of farming throughout the Greenbelt in Ontario.
“The public sector spends $750 million a year on food,” said Kelly Hughes, education and outreach specialist for the Greenbelt Fund.
“We realized that if we could tap into that market we would be offering a lot of support to those farmers.”
Hughes explained that by educating children on the importance of buying local food, it could help them make the choice to buy local when it’s time for them to begin purchasing groceries.
Weiler said the hope is to have a few schools using the new breakfast options sometime in December – and then roll the program out throughout the rest of the Catholic board in February when the new semester begins. After that, organizers will consider approaching other breakfast programs.
Not only are the dishes locally sourced, they’re also healthier than some other options, officials say.
“Most of our products have vegetables in them, like hidden zucchini, apples; not so much sugar,” Weiler said. “They’re nutritious.”
The program is also looking to produce less waste. Weiler said eventually they would like to give a week’s supply of applesauce to a school in Mason jars and provide a serving kit, eliminating waste created from the small plastic containers and foil lids from individual containers.
The funding the hospitality students received went towards developing, testing and perfecting the recipes, as well as to the purchase of a new oven.
Weiler said the program is now fully sustainable and schools that choose to purchase from St. James for their breakfast program will be receiving the food at cost.
“Our whole principle here is that we want to provide schools with a healthy product and we’re not in it to make a profit,” she explained. “We’re in it to demonstrate the use of local food and nutritious options.”
The program is also publishing a cookbook with all 10 recipes, which Weiler said she hopes is done by the end of this year.
