By: Lucy M, posted in: Events Music and arts Food Global village Students 3things Uni Community Poverty
14 Jun 2012.
Picture your ideal office. Does it include large chess pieces lining the shelves? Garden gnomes perched on a trophy cabinet? This is the Student Development Office – the quirky HQ of student volunteering programs at the University of New South Wales. These programs provide opportunities for students to work in indigenous communities, communities overseas and even tutor high school students! Nice!Every first semester Student Development runs a program that simply appeals to chefs, photographers, editors, graphic designers, marketers, sponsors and of course - crazy people who wear a red fez!
This year a dynamic team of awesome student volunteers, under the guidance of the Student Union 'Arc', created the 2012 Student Cookbook. A cookbook made by students for students - with the aim to get students back into the kitchen to cook delicious and nutritious food with little impact on the environment.So how to make a cookbook? Piece of cake! Students submitted recipes and the team of 7, picked 22 delicious, nutritious, affordable, sustainable and original recipes. Next you take stunning photos of the food, edit the recipes to make sense, create a sweet design and proof over 50 times. Finally, add further content, sponsorship, print on recycled paper and launch! Bon Apetite!
Along with DELISH recipes, the cookbook has many things you can do to improve your food habits. Here are 3things for you!
1. Eating sustainably
Often the food we eat travels a long way to get to our plate. The more ‘food miles’ you have, the greater impact your food has made on the environment. Sad face!Solution: You can eat seasonally and locally, yum! This means eating certain fruits and vegetables in winter and summer to reduce the pressure on food transport all the way down under. Check out the seasonal guide here! Also you can choose fairtrade products to help farmers receive a fair wage for the work they do - I recommend the Oxfam Fair Chocolate. Warning: too delicious.
2. Reducing food waste
In NSW alone, households throw out more than 800,000 tonnes of food a year. Not good!Solution: Reduce, reuse and recycle to ease the burden of food packaging. Make meal plans to use leftovers to their delicious potential! Some food scraps are inevitable like banana peels, so get composting and worm farming!
3. Celebrating our food world
Food unites us all. Unfortunately, in many countries obesity continues to rise, while currently in East and West Africa famine continues to leave people devastated by hunger.
Solution: Cooking wholesome foods that celebrate our different cultures. This is one way to connect back to the importance of food. This year’s cookbook winner, Silvia, wrote about her Italian Apple Cake recipe, “I originally transcribed this recipe from one of my grandma’s handwritten recipe notebooks back in Italy and have since adapted it to suit the Australian ingredients.”
How to really celebrate this grand food tale?
The cookbook was launched with a bang! The band Hot Potato played cool jazz tunes at the Roundhouse where hundreds of students came to eat delicious food from the cookbook including the Apple Cake, Kenyan Pilau and Chunky Lentil Soup, all cooked by student volunteers.
It was a big celebration of the hard-working volunteers and the direction students are taking to make a difference with cooking! Julie Goodwin, this year's cookbook judge, also made an appearance in the cookbook and sent a wonderful video for the launch. All the UNSW students were inspired to see her passion and her involvement made the cookbook pretty special! 3things was also there with the Oxfam UNSW student club and the Sustainability Office exhibited keep cups and recycling. Twas grand!But wait there's more...
Now it is your turn! 3 more things for you to sink your teeth into!
1. Create your own project! You could also make your own cookbook. Just get your friends and family to give you recipes and try to make them more environmentally friendly. Also you could find what you are interested in and use it to make a difference - like photography, music, graphics, marketing? All these skills were needed with a cookbook, imagine what you could do...?
2. Get informed! Knowing about world issues sure helped the cookbook passion have focus. You want to talk food? Get involved in Oxfam’s new campaign GROW looking at our broken food system and how we can do our bit to help.
3. Volunteer! There are so many volunteering opportunities available, especially at 3things, for you to get involved in, so get out there, learn new skills and get some great experience. You can meet like-minded people, make new friends and see the world in a different way!(Want to be hectically inspired? The Student Cookbook photographer volunteer, and most of the pics in this blog, are from Vanessa Low, check out her amazing work here: Vanessa Low)
