Utu Whakamua: Year 10 Food Technology
During Term 3 Our Year 10 Food Technology class undertook a project entitled Utu Whakamua. We learned that Utu Whakamua is about ‘Giving Back’ or ‘Paying it Forward’ or doing something special for others.
Our school does this well.
For our Utu Whakamua project we connected with KiwiHarvest which is a Food Rescue organisation.
We learned that when food waste is dumped in the landfill rots and produces methane gas which is one of the gases which contribute to global warming and in turn climate change etc. We also learned that most of this food is good food. It may be just on over order (too many for the shop) or the wrong shape, size or colour, or with a slight damage to the packaging. All perfectly good to eat, and yet thrown away.
The KiwiHarvest company was started when it was noticed one day that a newspaper article reported that tons of perfectly good food was being dumped into the landfill and another article reported that children were going to school with no breakfast and lunch and sometimes going to bed without dinner.
This was the beginning of their drive to create a way for the good food to never reach the landfill and for it to be collected and relocated to charity organisations – like Vinnies, Women’s Refuge, Everyone Eats, etc.
Our class shared our ideas for ways to support this valuable organisation.
We decided, as a class, to create recipe cards to be popped into each food box to give meal ideas to recipients, which could also be put on the website.
We then invited two of the staff from KiwiHarvest, Highbrook to receive our recipe ideas during our end of term 3 assembly.
Check their website www.kiwiharvest.org.nz for more information. Here are just a few of the recipes the students created:
