UHI Inverness students cook up for a good cause

Students from UHI Inverness have teamed up with a local charity again this winter to provide hundreds of meals for families struggling with the cost-of-living crisis.

The Professional Cookery level 4 students and their lecturer Saurav Kumar will cook 100 meals a week for three weeks, as part of Gateway’s Food for Families project. This is the seventh year that UHI Inverness has supported this initiative, which began 13 years ago.

Food for Families, a scheme by the Homeless Trust, 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 project expects to deliver around 3000 meals in total this year.

Saurav has incorporated the cooking of the meals into the current 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.

He said: “It is our pleasure to cook for such a good cause. The students are delighted to cook for the charity again this year because they know how much it means to the families who receive the meals. This is also a valuable learning opportunity for them, because they get to experience the commercial mass production of meals and develop their skills.”

Professor Chris O’Neil, Principal and Chief Executive at UHI Inverness, said: “We are proud of our students for taking on this challenge and again showing their compassion and generosity. We at UHI Inverness care about the communities around us and we welcome the opportunity to ease the burden for the local families who have been hit hard by the cost-of-living crisis.”

Alex Gilchrist, general manager for Gateway, said: “We are very grateful to the students and staff at UHI Inverness for their continued support and dedication to Food for Families. We are continuing to see a high demand for our frozen meals as more families face food poverty. Thanks to the help of our volunteers we are able to provide some relief to these families during the festive period.”