Ugly fruit and vegetables will be given a fairytale makeover and transformed into healthy meals at a Manchester cooking roadshow next month.
Wannabe chefs will be given the opportunity to conjure up three nutritionally-balanced and tasty meals from scratch using fresh ingredients and leftovers.
Fresh but cosmetically imperfect vegetables and fruits, and food intercepted from New Smithfield Market, will go to the ‘food ball’ through the cooking roadshow.
The Community Cooking Roadshow, by Cracking Good Food and FareShare Greater Manchester, is inviting 100 people into their cooking pods at New Smithfield Market in Openshaw on July 6.
Director of Cracking Good Food, Adele Jordan, explained that healthy meals were cheap and easy to rustle up at home.
She said: “We’re brainwashed by ever-more-sophisticated marketing by the global food industry, to think that healthy, tasty home-cooked food is expensive and tricky to master.
“And it’s simply not true – good food doesn’t need to be expensive once you know some basic cooking skills and a few tricks of the trade!”
A Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) study revealed that Britons throw away 7million tons of food waste each year, 4.2million tons of which is ‘avoidable’ meaning that it could have been eaten.
Cracking Good Food Coordinator, Corin Bell, explained: “In the UK around 15 million tonnes of food is wasted each year from plough to plate, meanwhile nearly 6million people in the UK really struggle to afford food, or afford the fuel to cook it.
“We need to start to find solutions to these problems and fix our broken food system.”
More than 100kg of food will be used during the cookery lessons between 11am and 2pm – all food which would have gone to waste.
The event aims to inspire people to cook healthy meals from scratch on very limited budgets.
As well as the free cooking lesson and free meal, all participants will receive recipes, ingredients, and store cupboard spices to take away, to inspire them to recreate the meal at home.
The Community Cooking Roadshow will take place at New Smithfield Market in Openshaw on July 6 between 11am and 2pm.
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Main image courtesy of Disney via Youtube and inset courtesy of Guo Chai Lim, with thanks
