Our very own MetMUncher, Jas Smith, is currently on a working placement with Manchester Fayre, Manchester City Council’s catering service, which supplies over 27,500 great value, nutritious meals in nursery, primary and secondary schools and social care facilities across Manchester each day.

Jas has been working alongside Cheryl Allen, one of Manchester Fayres Unit Managers based at St. Mary’s C of E Primary, Moston. Together they worked on an entry for The School Chef of the Year 2019. This is a national competition designed to show off school catering and the skill of our school chefs. Entry included designing, preparing and cooking an imaginative, two-course menu suitable for school children, compliant with the School Food Standards, costings, and other competition rules.

Their main course is a Beef Scone Whirl with vegetable accompaniments and meaty gravy.

The second course is a Peach Custard Tart, with a Fruity Salsa and Edible Flower Decoration.

Dishes were based around providing a rainbow of fruits and vegetables, and to ensure even the fussiest of eaters don’t miss out on health protecting nutrients, locally sourced fruits, and vegetables were finely chopped to disguise them in the Whirl to help ensure all children achieve a nutrient inclusive diet.

Jas and Cheryl made it through to the National Final but unfortunately they just missed out on top spot. A huge congratulations goes out to the creative pair as this is a great achievement and one they should be very proud of!

#SCOTY

MetMUnch have been on a mission to showcase sustainable, meat free food that is both delicious and nutrient dense. From the start of January, MetMUnch joined forces with the University’s catering team to bring its ‘Soup-erheroes’ and Meat Free Monday campaigns to the Business School.

Soup-erheroes launched on Wednesday 16^th January before returning a fortnight later, bringing superhero vegetables and their nutritional powers to the University. Soup is an amazing way to get all kinds of vitamins and minerals into your diet; they can keep you warm in the winter months and help lower food waste, as veg at the back of your fridge can be transformed into super-soups.

MetMUnch have also been making healthy meat free vegan food more accessible on campus. On Monday 21 January, they collaborated with the University catering team to hold a ‘meat free Monday’, and had all kinds of delicious food on offer including vegan chickpea, broccoli and spinach curry, chilli falafel burgers with salad and vegetable and lentil lasagne.

As the UK’s greenest university with top marks in the People & Planet award for environmental sustainability, the University has an important role to play in raising awareness of healthier eating, meat free meals and low carbon food production.

Our global population recently hit 7 billion and we’re on course for 10 billion mouths to feed in 2050. The world urgently needs to find a way of producing enough food for all these people and reducing our dependency on meat will play a major role.

The campaign got the backing of the official MeatFreeMonday campaign, started by Sir Paul McCartney, and has had some sensational feedback on social media. Here are some of the tweets:

This was the first trial of its kind at the University and was a huge success. Both staff and students are now waiting to see what delicious, healthy and imaginative food will come next.

For more information, follow MetMUnch on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

#Souperheroes #MetMUnchMeatFree #WeDontDoOrdinary

MetMUnch has teamed up with a sci-artist to develop some bee-utiful materials for their exciting To Bee or Not To Bee event at the Museum of Science and Industry.

Kelly Stanford creates art themed around scientific concepts, and uses it for science communication purposes. Kelly is currently involved in is the STEM Bee sculpture, which will be located at Manchester Oxford Road station from July 23rd to September 23rd. The bee sculpture is embellished with science facts, imagery from research publications, poetry and portraits of famous local scientists.Kelly also started the John Dalton Garden Project after noticing how much diversity in plant and insect species there was in such a small-enclosed urban space.

She said: “Having started the John Dalton Garden Project I was surprised to spot Ashy Mining Bees burrowing in the wooden planters – a species which isn’t recorded as being present here on the NBN Atlas. This inspired me to go ahead documenting and illustrating what I saw. I’m hoping to build a visual guide of all plant and insect species in the garden to raise awareness of what can potentially be found in an urban environment such as university campuses.

“I feel that small-scale studies such as these are really important in highlighting the fact that species that were once pushed out by urban development can now be successfully
reintroduced, even with minimal space and resources.”

Continuing with the bee theme, Kelly has now teamed up with MetMUnch to create bee-utiful materials that highlight the diversity of food that bees help to produce, and dangers they face as numbers continue to drop. MetMUnch will be at the Bee: Late event at the Museum of Science and Industry is being held on Wednesday 25^th July, which will have lots of fun and interactive bee-themed activities. Visitors will be able to see first-hand what the collaboration has developed in what promises to be a great evening.

For more information go to – https://www.msimanchester.org.uk/whats-on/bee-late

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 For one night only, MetMUnch’s nutrition team of ‘gastronauts’ highlighted the wonders of eating bone friendly, calcium rich food, to over 700 people, space style.

Having been invited by the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) to be involved in its Space: Late event, which also showcased Tim Peake’s Soyuz spacecraft, MetMUnch sent people on a food journey that took them beyond the stratosphere and into the nutritional stars.

Like on Earth, astronauts eat three meals a day, with nutritionists ensuring the food they eat provides them with a balanced supply of vitamins and minerals. However, calorie requirements are much higher for astronauts. Depending on the person’s gender and body mass, they could require between 2000 and 3200 calories. This is believed to be because the body is never truly at rest while in space and so requires more fuel to keep going.

Being in the space environment is also known to induce bone loss and, subsequently, calcium loss. According to NASA, astronauts that spend an extended period in space can lose on average one to two percent of bone mass each month.

However, calcium deficiencies and bone loss aren’t just an issue in outer space, with osteoporosis now affecting over three million people in the UK according to the International Osteoporosis Foundation.

With this in mind, MetMUnch set its nutritional scientists a mission to reveal how astronauts, and people back on Earth, can receive their calcium in a fun, sustainable, and easy to digest fashion, in a space-age way only MetMUnch can.

Having received official ‘space food’ direct from NASA, the MetMUnch team set about recreating it in Manchester Metropolitan University’s labs. This meant choosing calcium rich foods to be vacuum-packed. A selection of broccoli, beetroot, strawberries, blackberries and raspberries were freeze-dried into powder and sealed. These were accompanied by dried apricots, prunes and dates be given to the public.

The evening was a resounding success for all concerned, and guests left with space food and new information to savour. MSI’s Contemporary Science Programme Producer, Gina Cooke, said: “We always look forward to working with MetMUnch as they repeatedly generate exciting ideas for public engagement, which ultimately inspires our audience. Gastronauts is the perfect example of this. It was part of our popular Space:Late, which over 700 visitors attended.

“MetMUnch brought a huge team of passionate MetMUnchers who opened up conversations about the importance of calcium. They even gave visitors vacuum-packed food samples to take home. It complimented our programme and provided a new spin on the theme. They were one of the most popular activities on the night and we can see why!”

With companies looking to go on missions to Mars, space food will need to be lightweight and nutrition dense to save on weight, but also flavoursome and creative to avoid ‘menu fatigue’ in space. This means nutritionists will have to come up with something dynamic, but also sustainable due to restrictions in space. The event seems to have left some students inspired to the step up to the challenge.

Faizan Khokhar, a Level 4 Nutritional Sciences student, said: “Working within the MetMunch team allows you to broaden your knowledge on a variety of subjects, and gives you the opportunity to inform and educate others, through events such as the Space: Late evening held at MSI, which was a successful collaboration.

“When you seriously start to contemplate about working as a nutritionist for NASA in the future, you know how much you enjoyed the event.”

Check out our hashtag, #Gastronauts on social media to see how the night unfolded or visit our Flickr for more photos.

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