At the café we prepare fresh meals every college day and we are always varying the the meals with different seasonal proteins and vegetables.
For each age group we portion up an appropriate meal size and while we do encourage the meal to be taken no one ever forces a student to eat it. Some students won’t finish their main meal while others may come back for seconds and sometimes thirds if their group’s allocation isn’t finished. If a student tries the main meal and doesn’t finish it, we are okay with this as we sometimes make foods that have not been eaten before, but what really frustrates us is when a student takes a whole heap of food from the buffet which they have collected themselves and throws that away. At no time is this okay. Not only is it a waste, they are throwing money away that could be used elsewhere within the college.
The buffet is always full of options e.g. homemade salads, olives, pineapple, tomato, cucumber, artichoke, Greek yoghurt, dried fruits, dips, vegetable sticks, corn and fresh hand-cut fruit salad. The list goes on and on.
Choices and Consequences:
While on camp this week with the primary college I spent 24/3 (24 hours x 3 days) with the students. I noticed the effects of choices the kids made with their eating.
One evening we had beef sausages and chicken skewers with fried onion, coleslaw, potato salad, diced pineapple and bread. While most students ate the meat with bread and sauce, not many touched the salad. The next morning breakfast was scrambled eggs, toast with spreads, juice, warm milo, cereal and milk. Again some just had cereal while others had some of everything. That day I had some students asking me at 10am when they could eat lunch. When I asked them if they had eaten all that was on offer none answered yes.
That being said I understand that some students may not like certain foods but when there is no cupboard to go and grab a snack from is the potato salad such a bad option?
One of the best things I saw at camp was the amount of water that was consumed; the college had taken 200 litres of bottled water from a bottled water delivery service (just in case) but the tap water was fine and seeing the kids fill their drink bottles over and over was fantastic.
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