A Taste of Perthshire
Sous Chef: Welcome to Jamesfield’s Farm & Restaurant. This is where we are preparing the meal tonight. In about three hours from now we’re going to be cooking a meal for 50 people; the atmosphere will be great. They’ll be coming in to get an absolutely fantastic meal.
Teacher: The aims of the project were to produce a gala dinner for 50 people using local Perthshire food and food and produce grown by our Intermediate 1 Hospitality class.
Pupil 1: The gala dinner is going to be for 50 people at a local farm called Jamesfield and its all about looking at local produce and bringing in the best of what we’ve got in Scotland.
Teacher: The gala dinner project came about when a person called Jim Fairlie approached us.
The Farmer: My name is Jim Fairlie; I'm a local farmer in Perth & Kinross. They talked about being a health promoting school and having 12 acres of ground here, in the school. I thought well, ‘Wow. How can I get involved to really develop the health promoting idea?’
Headteacher: One of the themes running right through the whole project is the knowledge of healthy eating and the understanding of where produce comes from, the importance of considerations like air-miles for food.
The Farmer: I came with the idea that they turn some of the ground over to grow fruit and vegetables. They already had a bit of garden here which they were using for the biology class. We then decided that what we would do is grow fruit in the garden, take it to the home economics department so that there would be a link between the kids who were growing stuff out here and the kids that were doing home economics. And then we developed the idea so that we created a gala dinner.
The Head Chef
Head Chef: We decided to do a gala dinner for 50 people to promote the ‘from soil to plate’ concept to get people to talk about local food and try to see if we could get all the produce from as local [areas] as possible.
The Farmer: From a health promoting school point of view, you're covering every aspect so that it’s the kids that are looking after their own health, their own environment. They know where their food comes from, they're doing costings on what its actually going to cost to get this food grown and into the home economics department.
And then they're going to take it out to the wider community, and the wider community are going to say, ‘Well, this food has been grown, prepared, harvested and delivered to us by Perth High School kids.’ And that, to me, encompassed everything that a health promoting school is about.
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