Culinary arts students at VIU’s Cowichan campus recently served up a slew of soups with a community edge.
It was all part of the program’s Soup Challenge – a two-day event that brings together flavor, creativity and skill to give back to the community in a unique way.
During the event, Loaves and Fishes Nanaimo donates a bunch of food to the cooking class. The students do not know what awaits them and their challenge is to make as much soup as possible with the ingredients provided.
The students in the classes create the soups and the Cowichan Green Community distributes the soup to community members in need.
“I love the layers of learning that occur with this classroom experience,” says Francois de Jong, VIU Cowichan Culinary Instructor. “The students were surprised that the food we were given was of such good quality and would have been composted if the Loaves and Fishes food recovery program hadn’t picked it up and delivered it to people in the need. »
In creating the soup, the students followed a “method-based approach” to creating the soups, de Jong said. Essentially, that meant “solving problems through the variety of products they had to choose from each morning.”
In total, this year’s students created 45 different kinds of soups, totaling 345.4 litres.
