Food and PLACE go hand in hand

Food etc partners with The Place Programme to bring collaborative cooking to home-educating families.

Food has always had a strong sense of place. Whether it’s local produce, a regional dish, a cultural tradition or a taste of home from far away, the places in which food, cooking and eating are experienced are powerful and deeply impactful. This was especially true when Food etc. worked with local support service, The PLACE Programme, to quite literally bring food and PLACE, together.

PLACE is a friendly community of home educators, offering support and enrichment to home educated families across Bedford. In fact, it’s the only Council funded support service for home educating families in the UK, and when the opportunity to work together came up, as part of School Food Matters’ Young Marketeers Programme, we jumped at the chance to collaborate again.

Over six weeks, Food etc. hosted cookery workshops for PLACE children and families to come together and transform the fresh produce they’d grown in their own shared garden into simple, healthy meals.

Over the course of our time working with PLACE, we helped families cook-up their own pea and mint soup, soda bread and (a very popular) carrot cake. The workshop offered a unique and valuable opportunity for home educated children and their parents to cook together and connect over good food, in a fun supportive space.

“The world today lives on processed food. We have children from all sorts of backgrounds. It’s really good to see our families learning and working together with skills that are for life,” said Julie Woolerson, PLACE programme Assistant Manager.

“Each child really enjoyed the session and were eager to share in their finished products. They had a sense of achievement, especially from growing the veg in our PLACE garden and getting the vegetables to the kitchen ready to use from scratch.”

Programmes like PLACE are a vital resource for the many families who home educate, and working with them to offer them a memorable, hands-on culinary learning experience, gave parents and children another chance to get the sort of social, out-of-home enrichment, that’s not always easily accessible, and that PLACE so brilliantly provides. A moment where they could bring things full circle, from garden to plate – by growing, selling and cooking together, and giving food a new sense of place.