Students save the starving

CLASSROOM kitchens at three schools are making meals for SecondBite, helping people doing it tough.

BYLINE - LUKE BOWDEN: Montrose Bay High School cooking students, Sarah Vidler, 13 and Rhys Robinson, 15 cooking meals that will be distributed by Second Bite.

THREE kitchens were not in SecondBite’s sights when the food-rescue service began in Tasmania six years ago.

Strictly speaking it does not have them now, but classroom kitchens at three schools are making meals for SecondBite, which helps people doing it tough, helps the students learn to cook.

SecondBite collects mostly fresh food, which would otherwise go to waste, from farmers and supermarkets.

Last summer, an embarrassment of cherries came to SecondBite. State manager Aaron Kropf got in touch with Nigel Walsh, a teacher’s aide at Montrose Bay High School at Glenorchy, and a week later SecondBite had dozens of jars of cherry jam to distribute to the 36 school breakfast clubs.

Montrose High started its SecondBite program in 2013 at the instigation of principal Mandy Reynolds-Smith. This year, Claremont College came on board (assistant principal Megan Gunn had been involved with SecondBite earlier at the now closed Geilston Bay High). And in the past few weeks Devonport High School has joined the scheme.

The scheme at Montrose High started with four students and one hotplate, but now 100 students have been through the scheme and it is running smoothly, with older students overseeing younger ones.

The week I visited, pressed chicken, carrots, onions, potatoes and jars of pumpkin and tomato pasta sauce became a pasta bake. The recipe went up on the whiteboard and the class took it from there, chopping up vegetables and chicken and boiling pasta. Well before the bell goes, 60 very generous serves of pasta bake are packed and in the freezer — and still there are some samples for the kids to try.

SecondBite stocks 30 hampers a day, collected by various food agencies and delivered to people’s homes within an hour. Aaron says as well as helping the people who receive the food, SecondBite hampers help the agencies stretch their limited funding further.

The kids who do the two classes a week at Montrose are at some sort of risk — of poor attendance, of not joining in or maybe simply being in need of some cooking skills.

At Claremont, Megan Gunn says participation gives students “a sense of purpose to their learning”. To ensure it keeps going, SecondBite’s relies on donations to pay for such things as labels and containers.

To help or donate to secondbite phone [phone] or email [e-mail]