Roast Dinner Day: an invitation to Warwickshire schools
The national Roast Dinner Day is coming around again on 2 November and it’s a great opportunity to promote the quality of healthy meals your school provides to children at a time when schools across the country will be doing likewise. The event draws national media attention to the work of schools and the hard efforts of their cooks and midday supervisors.
Last year, Warwickshire schools participated in very successful Roast Dinner Days to celebrate the quality of school meals and healthy eating. Brownsover and Newton Regis School in particular got major national media coverage on the day.
Roast Dinner Day in Warwickshire is supported by the Food for Life team commissioned by the Warwickshire County Council Public Health Department.
If you would like to enrol you can either:
- a) Send an email saying you want to take part in Roast Dinner to ffl@foodforlife.org.uk
- b) Register online by visiting the Food for Life page.
Food for Life’s co-founder Jeanette Orey OBE, the school cook who teamed up with Jamie Oliver in challenging the poor standards of school meals, visited Brownsover and was impressed with their efforts as a silver awarded school now aiming to become the first Food for Life gold award school in the county.
Great prizes to be won
This year’s Roast Dinner Day competition focuses on ‘food miles’ and is all about raising awareness of how many miles the food in your roast dinner has travelled before it reaches the dinner plate. Why not run an assembly on the subject of food miles a or take part in the competition and you could win an aluminium vegetable trug or a set of professional Pro Cook gourmet knives for your school cooks.
You can involve as many children as you like whether in your school nutrition action group or a class. How about a little project investigation into where the ingredients for your roast dinner came from? The prize is for the best blog on your school’s portal on the Food for Life website which shows how you worked with the school cooks and others in finding out where the food for Roast Dinner Day is coming from. This is regardless of the number of food miles a meal has travelled from the farm to the plate. Try to include graphs, photos, maps to make your blog as interesting and informative as possible including how you found out the answers or best guesstimates.
Your local contacts
If you are interested in participating in ‘Roast Dinner Day’ and would like to see how we could help, please get in touch with:
Bret Willers Warwickshire Food for Life programme manager
bwillers@soilassociation.org
07786 994442
Valerie Meehan Warwickshire Food for Life programme officer
vmeehan@soilassociation.org
07736 888462