A Space Of Our Own

After several years, the Mini Cooking Club finally has a space it can call home! In collaboration with the London Kitchen Project, aided by a great team from Marks and Spencer’s “Spark Something Good” community initiative, we transformed out new home into a swanky new kitchen, complete with a spacious seating area and outdoor herb garden, in just 16 hours!

 With Cecilia up and ready to take the first delivery scheduled for 7am, it was going to be a long day for all involved. After many hours of hard graft by everyone, the sun went down but the space was finished just in time. 

Spark Something Good

Much of the expertise provided on the day came at the hands of the shop fitting team at M&S. They provided the equipment and skills needed to make the renovations possible in such a limited period.

The campaign’s ambitious goal is to transform 24 community projects in 24 hours. Led by Joanna Lumley and CEO Marc Bolland, they were also giving a helping hand across London to other projects: an unused London rooftop was given a children’s play area, a community farmyard was renovated and a busy soup kitchen given a new dining room and edible garden.

Get Involved

The project brings together M&S customers and employees and allows them to work together to support causes they feel are worthy of help in their local communities. This can be anything from spending time with the elderly, to renovating facilities into something new and much better. If you want to get involved, there is more information here.

Spark Something Good has been developed alongside Neighbourly, which is a social network connecting community projects with businesses that want to help. Without them, and the help of Unity,  we wouldn’t have been able to achieve what we did this week.

The MCC would also like to send a huge thank you to the several dozen volunteers who came and went throughout the day. Everyone’s positivity was so uplifting, with many local residents coming over expressing their excitement at the new collaboration.

We’re really excited to be running our first classes for 5-11 year olds on a Saturday, and hope to have some more exciting stuff happening soon.

Cookability: back to food basics for the twenty-first century

‘Knowing what to eat and knowing what’s good for you is a basic human right.’ Michael Davies, Cookability founder.

Michael Davies works for Cookability, a social enterprise which delivers cooking lessons to both 11-16 year old pupils in schools and individuals aged between 18 and 24.

‘I want to teach people how to cook and make good decisions about what to eat,’ says Michael.

Cookability was founded in 2013 to teach healthy cooking and eating skills to young people. They also support UK schools as they prepare to teach healthy cooking in the 2014 National Curriculum.

Cooking over takeaways

‘20-24 year olds: they’re the group I feel most need to learn how to cook because they’re on they’re own, and vulnerable to falling back on takeaway services,’ says Michael. ‘People need to eat, they don’t know how to cook, so they turn to what’s available and affordable, but the empty calories aren’t going to do your body any good.

‘I look to get them engaged using a very direct style, use lots of questions to get them thinking about what they’re doing. I let them play and have fun with what they’re doing, letting them experiment and explore.’

Budding food network

The Mini Cooking Club and Cookability connected through budding Public Food & Health Network brought together by academic Martin Caraher, which aims to unite the charitable organisations individually striving to improve the nation’s health through cooking and nutrition knowledge. This is especially fitting considering Cookability’s ethos.

‘Food and fellowship, food and socialising - it’s a big part of food.’ Oddly enough, a fact people often forget, in a culture of food-on-the-go and microwave meals for one.

Reaching out to schools

Michael’s been working on a project called 'Ingredients for Learning' which encourages supermarkets to donate leftover produce to cooking lessons in school. This overcomes one of the biggest barriers to many children learning how to cook: simple cost.

‘I think there’s a lot of long-term demand for free food at schools to teach kids how to cook.’

In return, Michael uses social media to communicate the message back to the community, raising the profile of the private organisations who are getting involved.

‘Sitting down and eating together, you just can’t beat it.’

Practical nutrition and skills

‘It’s about skills transfer, working with small groups of people, building their confidence with food and cooking, giving them some really practical knowledge about nutrition - e.g. the Eat Well plate which I use all the time to plan my own meals,’ says Michael.

‘Cookability promotes practical nutrition, cooking with real food and using ingredients that your grandparents would have recognised. Ideally avoiding processed ingredients - a back to basics for the twenty-first century.’

The wider picture

Michael has attended a french cooking school and also worked in New York kitchens, bringing an incredibly varied and vibrant background to the south London not-for-profit cooking scene.

In the future, he would like to reach out to older groups of people who may be dealing with isolation and loneliness.

‘Programs like Cookability and the Mini Cooking Club are about giving people a fundamentally positive experience with food, and practical doable steps that they can take forwards to develop their ability as cooks and their interest in food, giving them more choices for living healthier lives.’

Find out more about Cookability. If you’re from an organisation and would be interested in becoming involved in the Public Food & Health Network, please contact info@theminicookingclub.org.uk.