What Chefs in Schools do
In 2017 Henry Dimbleby, Nicole Pisani, Jo Weinberg and I sat around a table at Wahaca to discuss childhood obesity and how to tackle it.
Nicole, ex head chef at Nopi restaurant, had been a school chef at Henry’s childrens’ school since 2013 and had transformed how the children ate there, throwing away the powdered food and bread-crumbed objects and bringing in daily baked bread, fresh fruit and vegetables and a whole ingredient approach. The cost of her ingredients was 50p per pupil, per day less than the ultra processed food she had inherited when she took over the kitchen; we felt this was an amazing model to roll out, believing that if you teach children young, they quickly learn a passion for good food and cooking, and the ability to feed themselves cheaply but well.
In 2017 London had the worse obesity rates of any peer city, and today, in deprived areas 1 in 3 children are obese, an epidemic that costs the NHS £10 billion a year in the UK. We set up Chefs in Schools in 2018 to tackle this; for me, a positive side effect would be to teach a generation of children how to cook with vegetables, resulting in the adoption of more climate-friendly diets.
In lockdown, and as part of their covid-19 response, Chefs in Schools temporarily started school hubs so that they could feed children in need, and their families. Using government funding and food donated by companies like the Felix Project, Belazu and Fare Share, and with the help of their volunteers, including some of the very lovely chefs at Wahaca, they produced nearly 200,000 meals for families in need.