Photo: Students line up for lunch at Iqaluit’s Inuksuk High School on Dec. 7. The new accessible lunch program is making healthy food a priority for students. (PHOTOS BY BETH BROWN)
School-grown veggies featured in free meals to help feed hungry students
Students at Inuksuk High School aren’t just eating their greens; they’re growing them, too.
The Iqaluit school is just a few weeks into its new free-lunch program, and so far is able to source most ingredients used in healthy salads from a set of six hydroponic towers that are blooming with fresh leafy greens like lettuce, kale, spinach and bok choy.
“Basically all of our salads are now grown in the cafeteria,” said food studies teacher Lael Kronick. “We get this mix of very fresh herbs and produce that would be expensive or impossible to import, especially the fresh herbs and tender greens.
“It’s part of our conversation about food insecurity and food sovereignty.”
Kronick noticed a need for a lunch program when she started working at the high school last year.
“I heard from kids, and observed, that a lot [of them] did not have lunches,” she said.
So Kronick found funding through organizations like the Nunavut Food Security Coalition to change that problem. READ MORE
Beth Brown
December 11, 2017
www.nunatsiaqonline.ca
