“It’s been incredible to watch the students become more accustomed to adding different vegetables and herbs to their cooking.”
- Project Manager, Jilkminggan and MacFarlane (NT)
At Jilkminggan, involvement in the EON program begins when children attend FaFT*, and preschool, and continues right up to Year 12. Healthy Eating lessons have focused on eating foods that promote wound healing and reducing salt, sugar and fat to prevent conditions like high blood pressure and heart disease. The students will often split up into two groups and have ‘cook offs’, where teams are judged on their ability to use as much garden produce as possible and experiment with different herbs and spices.
Members of the community have voiced concern for their high rates of type 2 diabetes, so lessons with the high school students have focused on more intensive diabetes education using pictorial and interactive resources. Diabetes has also been a focus of the fortnightly adult cooking classes that are run by both the EON Project Manager and Community Assistant, Shakira Rory. Shakira’s confidence in delivering key nutrition messages in Kriol to the adults in her community is growing as each week goes by.
Cooking ‘green mac and cheese’ has been a crowd favourite across all age groups, adding in whatever green vegetables and herbs have grown in the garden. The students are not short of choice thanks to Community Assistants Matthew Duncan and Kiefin Mardi who tend to a large orchard area and over 14 garden beds that have successfully grown produce such as lettuce, bok choy, tomatoes, cauliflower, sweet potato and zucchinis.
Matthew and Kiefin have also assisted in creating a new garden space for FaFT, where chillies are plentiful but must be picked quickly as they’re highly sought after by everybody in the community! Kale from this garden is almost always added into any dish the FaFT cook, as it’s an important source of iron for the little ones.
*Families as First Teachers Program
