Deploy it well and quickly with all staff, no nutrition background required

It's practical and works in communities with limited food choices

Ties into the NWT curriculum to bring difficult topics from the textbook, to the table

Tastemakers

Tastemakers is a school cooking and nutrition program. We created Tastemakers from the ground up in the north, for the north.

What is Taste Makers?

Taste Makers is a tailored nutrition program for the North. We built it with three things in mind.

Limited Food Options

First, we knew it needed recipes that would work in real Northern communities. Simple recipes like fruit salad in previous cooking programs have met the realities of food supply in the North and become “Sliced apples” in one community and “Diced pears” in the next. The recipes were all created from scratch to work with the foods that are available in northern stores, and from the land, with fall-backs and substitution guides for when the ice road is out or caribou is not available.

Deploy With Any Staff

It also needed to be a course that anyone could teach. Many schools have no resident specialist in health (let alone foods). We created a manual for teachers that accompanies the lesson and draws on real experience from our pilot programs to give teachers what they really need to know, and save them from having to read huge volumes of information that they probably won’t be asked about.

Ties Into Curriculum

Lastly and most importantly, schools need to love it. We met with principals and teachers to figure out how we could make their jobs easy as possible, and make things with them in mind at all times. First we tied it into the grade six curriculum. Schools reported this as an age level that very few external programs address (most aim at grade eight and above). The curriculum link also allows the program to be fitted into class time as teachers are covering essential curriculum material. Now instead of teaching students what fractions are using pie charts on a whiteboard, they can teach them using measuring cups and actual (nutritious) pies. Response from principals to this has been extremely positive, and it makes it so much more than a cooking program.

When is Taste Makers?

Coming in 2012 we are currently fundraising and hope to bring it to all schools in the NWT.