Marlborough School's Food Vision
Marlborough School's Food Vision
Marlborough is committed to providing its pupils and staff with a healthy, tasty and responsibly sourced lunch each day. With our constantly evolving menus we aim to nourish, inspire and satisfy everybody involved, encouraging sustainable eating habits.
By using a wide range of foods from different cultures we aim to broaden horizons and provide a whole host of different ingredients, all of which are important in making up a varied nutritious diet. We don’t like the idea of chemicals and pesticides being in our food so strive to use as much organic produce as possible.
Our pupils learn about climate change and global warming here, and we try to do our bit for the planet by providing delicious vegetarian options everyday along with meat free days most weeks. We only use free-range eggs and always source fish from sustainable stocks. We hate waste, so we compost in our grounds and recycle all our cans, plastics and cardboard. In the end we throw out very little. We hope to help create a school full of conscious consumers, so like to talk about our many local suppliers and why we choose them.
We think the social experience of sitting down to lunch with friends is an important one, and aim to make it as enjoyable as possible with small queues, a clean dining hall and friendly, supportive lunchtime staff. We hope to increase the school meal take up as time goes on, already having lowered the price for juniors who have a meal every day. We know this has improved the service, giving us an increased budget for even better produce, more menu options and more staff.
Our school parliament contains a working party responsible for liaising with the kitchen. This is a vital link, helping us harness the pupil’s feedback and ideas. Now that the kitchen is truly ours again it has become an integral part of the children’s food education programme, involved in everything from cooking club to tuck shop to Apple Day. We are also involved in the school’s growing activity; we pick herbs, salads and edible flowers from the grounds and last year harvested enough potatoes from the allotment to feed the whole school mashed potato twice!
We think Marlborough has the potential to be a hub of food culture not only for the children, but also for the parents and the local people around us: this is something we are encouraging by inviting parents into the school to eat or volunteer and by getting involved in local events (eventually holding our own!) and local communities.