Three thousand meals and counting – UHI Inverness students continue to cook up food for families in need

UHI Inverness students are again cooking up free food for families in need this winter and have hit the milestone of providing 3,000 meals since 2017.

The Professional Cookery Level 4 students and their lecturers Saurav Kumar and Richard Coyne have teamed up with a local charity to make hundreds of meals to feed people struggling with the cost-of-living crisis over the festive period.
This is the eighth year that UHI Inverness has supported this initiative, which began 13 years ago, and this year they will cook more than 100 meals a week for three weeks for Gateway’s Food for Families project. 

“We started working with Gateway to provide meals in Christmas 2017 and this will be the eighth year. On average the students cook 420 to 450 meals every year, and in total we have produced around 3000 meals up to now,” said Saurav.

Food for Families, a Highland Homeless Trust scheme, aims to help families in need across the Highlands by providing them with food and essentials over the festive season. The meals cooked by the students are collected by the charity, frozen and then distributed through local schools and social work teams in Inverness and Ross-shire. 
The preparing and packaging of the meals have been incorporated into December’s lesson plan. The class takes delivery of the ingredients on Wednesday mornings and prepares the meals to have them ready in individual tubs for collection on Thursday afternoons.

Saurav added: “It is a pleasure for us to cook for the families again this year, as we know the meals will make a big difference to them. It’s also a beneficial experience for our students because it encourages them to use their developing skills to benefit others, emphasises the value of these skills and allows them to learn about the commercial mass production of meals.”

Professor Chris O’Neil, Principal and Chief Executive of UHI Inverness, said: “We are proud of our students and staff for being generous with their time and skills by taking on this challenge every year, and it has now become an established part of the learning experience we offer our cookery students. We at UHI Inverness care about the communities around us and we welcome the opportunity to work with our partners to support local families.”

Alex Gilchrist, general manager for Gateway, said: “The food preparation by students and staff at UHI Inverness is a very important element of this voluntary team effort to feed families in food poverty during the festive period, and we could not do it without their continued support and dedication which we are very thankful for.”