Nutritious and delicious food made from scratch is on the menu at Gisborne Secondary College.
Students have been sharpening their skills through a cooking course delivered by local culinary nutritionists Expert Eats, Sunbury and Cobaw Community Health, Healthy Heart of Victoria and Macedon Ranges Shire Council.
The classes are based on the cooking videos of comedian and YouTube sensation Nat from ‘Nat’s What I Reckon’.
Nat’s brand of funny and straight-forward cooking videos encourage people to avoid processed foods and experience the joys of real cooking.
Nat appeared via livestream to help launch the program and spoke to the students about his beliefs around the importance of healthy eating and mental wellbeing.
The comedian is also a mental health advocate and has talked about his own experiences with anxiety and depression in his videos.
As well as cooking in class, students take home an ingredient pack to recreate the meal at home. They are asked to document the experience in their own creative way. This will form part of their class assessment task and they will go in a draw to win a prize pack at the end of the course.
Dietician Jessica Malcolm and culinary nutritionist Jen Beachey from Expert Eats lead the classes.
Expert Eats was established a couple of years ago with the aim of teaching people how to create nutritious food to support gut health and mental health.
“We have been focusing on school-age children and their families,” Jen said.
“Our aim is to prevent poor nutrition and support mental health by developing people’s confidence in knowing how to feed themselves a healthy and nutritious diet.
“Mental health is a complex issue that is affected by many factors, some of which we cannot change but the one thing we can always improve is our eating patterns, and every small positive change counts.”
