Restaurant chefs are reinventing school dinners in the UK

Food can either be medicine or it can be poison,” says Nicole Pisani, co-founder of Chefs in Schools, a charity that aims improve school meals and teaches children how to cook. “It’s our choice.”

Eight years ago, Pisani quit her job as head chef at one of London’s chicest restaurants – Soho’s Nopi, which was set up by Yotam Ottolenghi – and made the unusual move to become a school chef at Gayhurst community school in Hackney.

“The reason I fell in love with food was to see people enjoy it and to feel like you’re connecting with someone because you’ve cooked for them,” she says. “But the longer you spend in restaurants, the less of that good feeling you get.”

It was a surprising move that paid off. Three years ago, Pisani Duncan and Naomi Duncan founded Chefs in Schools. Now, the project has 44 passionate, trained chefs in 44 schools in the UK, most of which are in socially deprived regions. They feed around 16,000 children each day and teach them how to cook.

“Cooking with children is what I love most,” Pisani declares. “You turn into a five-year-old yourself. It’s hard not to be happy.” When she first started teaching children – using recipes such as beetroot brownies and banana splits – Pisani was blown away by how enthusiastic they were. 

“They were literally excited about grating cheese,” she says. “They loved going up and down the grater. I thought: ‘This is a lost workforce’.”

Her favourite moment was teaching seven- to fourteen-year-old schoolchildren how to cook chicken with vegetable paella over a fire pit. “They loved it,” Pisani laughs. “Cooking on fire is one of the oldest ways of cooking. There’s something quite mindful about it.”

Chefs in Schools offers school transformations to assist schools in improving their kitchens. The organisation is also launching a school chefs qualification. This training course will cover aspects like portion sizes, managing a team, and monitoring food waste. “The aim is to give school chefs more pride, show how important the role is, and for people to feel invested in cooking,” Pisani says.

Chefs in Schools, in collaboration with the Leap Federation also set up the Hackney School of FoodA school was established in March to teach both adults and schoolchildren how to make healthy, delicious meals.

“It’s really important that people know how to cook,” agrees Thomas Walker, head food educator at the school. “It’s an act of ownership in your life, because it helps your health and makes you feel good.”

The school has a large, bright kitchen, built in a renovated caretaker’s house, and an organic garden with apple and pear trees, a herb patch, honey bees, wildflowers and root vegetables.

Walker wants his pupils to know – tangibly – where their food comes from. “It’s this ‘seed to spoon, soil to mouth’ idea,” he says. “Meaning, we’ll pick something with the kids, prepare it, and eat it, it’s as fresh as you can get. I want them to realise that what we put into the soil feeds the plants, and they in turn feed us and give us energy.”

Walker’s classes are taught about nutrition, as well as learning technical skills, such as grating and chopping, and a variety of recipes. Children often love cooking bread most, Walker says. “We do lots of different bread recipes. It can get messy.” 

Walker says that some children are a bit skeptical at first but they love seeing their minds change. For example, one fussy eight-year-old didn’t like most of the ingredients in a vegetable soup. But after cooking and trying it, “he came up to me and said, ‘that is the best thing I’ve ever eaten’,” Walker recalls. “His pride in making it himself was amazing to see.”

Not only are schoolchildren passionate cooks. Walker recently taught a 70-year-old man, who was newly divorced, how to cook for the very first time. “He was so excited to go away and start his culinary career,” he enthuses. “You’re never too young – or too old – to learn to cook.”

Main image: Jim Stephenson