From the Bread & Roses Café @ Sky Dragon ~ Hamilton, Ontario
Introduction:We’re excited to be part of a revolution in school nutrition. The movement towards healthy school lunches is growing in strength and popularity. Increasingly parents are demanding that their kids be fed food to help them grow into healthy, bright, active and alert young people. Healthy food at school helps parents to do through KidzFood! what they themselves would want to do for their kids at home: emphasizing healthy, organic, locally grown ingredients in their kids’ lunches. This way of eating nurtures young bodies while it sustains our communities.
Here in Hamilton, inspired by you, The Bread & Roses Café and Catering Company wants to bring a healthy lunch service to the Dundas Valley Montessori School. Working with you we will make the daily chore of providing a true homemade lunch for your children just one less thing for you to worry about in your busy day.
With kid-friendly recipes from a variety of childhood health food recipe collections, a flair for popular flavours, and an eye to appealing colours and textures, we will offer the kind of meal that you would be proud to serve in your own home. We share your concern for the environment, and make minimizing any negative impacts of our catering services a constant priority.
About Bread& Roses:
The Bread & Roses Café opened its doors in September, 2006 and his been winning friends (and a major national restaurant award)* ever since. Founded by whole foods chef Karen Burson, the café was dedicated to providing food that is healthy, tasty, and organically grown and/or locally sourced.
*The Canadian Organic Growers presented the Organic Hero award to the café as being “The Best Restaurant Serving Organic Food in Canada”, alongside winners in other categories, such as Chef Michael Stadtlander, journalist Jill Eisen, and Food Activist Ann Clark
About the Meals:
Each meal is nutritionally balanced and designed to appeal to the world’s pickiest eaters: kids!
Every day at lunch time your child will be served a lunch made up of the following items:
>A hearty vegetarian entrée
>Salad or other green vegetable and/ or fresh fruit
The lunches will be served family style, on platters so that children may help themselves, and be encouraged to try new foods by watching other kids enjoying them. This style of service also minimizes the need for fancy lunch boxes or wasteful individual/disposable serving-ware. Their lunch will be served on real plates, with proper utensils.
Organic, Local, Freshly Made Food:
We believe in the primacy of organic food. Local food is important, but how that food is grown is a crucial issue in determining whether locally grown food is actually good for the kids. We talk to the farmers who produce the food we buy. We ask about what is sprayed and how often, and are satisfied with the answers provided by Hamilton Farmer’s Market stalwart family farm stand, Buttrum’s. We also have close ties to Plan B Organic Farm and Simpler Thyme Organic Farm because they’ve actually set up in our café to sell produce on Saturdays, and have been doing so for almost as long as the café has been in existence. We don’t follow the organic’s call blindly: imported, ‘monocultured’ organic food that has lost its colour, flavour and nutrients due to long-distance shipping is not the solution. All those miles of burned fossil fuels are not a good deal for our pocketbooks or the environment either!
Local food has many advantages when you emphasize freshness and seasonality when choosing what to put on the menu each month. As guides for menu planning and purchasing Bread & Roses takes advantage of four main resources:
>The advice of our local Organic Farmers
>The Foodland Ontario Fresh Fruit and Vegetables Availability Guide
>The good judgement and experience of our chefs
>You, the parents!
We ask for and appreciate your input, every step of the way.
A long list of commonly allergenic and/or unhealthy foods will not be used in our meals. These ingredients include processed white sugar, peanuts, tree nuts, and cornstarch. The school has provided us with a detailed list of items to be avoided, and avoiding those items will be part of the menu planning process for each meal served.
Minimizing Damage to the Environment:
How many of the city’s restaurants make composting their unusable food scraps part of their everyday functioning as a business? Bread & Roses brought regular green box pick-ups to King William Street in Downtown Hamilton, and is one of only a handful of restaurants in the city to operate a comprehensive recycling program. Ask around the next time you’re dining out… (ask staffers, not managers, if you want to hear the real story).
Bread & Roses uses environmentally responsible cleaning solutions, and our disposable take-out containers and coffee cups are compostable.
Education:
The potential here is enormous, everything from ‘lunch-making parties’ that would allow the kids to learn a new culinary skill or two; to potentially partnering with suitable community groups to create gardening experiences in and around the school; and perhaps out into the community at large. We’ve just started taking some steps forward…
Community:
What brings people together like food? Special food related events or possibly a formal farm-to-schools education program could be created. Cooking from other cultures could be the basis of other events (or even simply a menu theme).
Sample Menus and a Recipe with Nutritional Breakdown
Contact KidzFood! to receive a sample monthly meals-at-a-glance chart to find out what kinds of foods will be prepared for your kids.Contact Karen B:kcburs@yahoo.com or 905-777-8102 ext. 2
