Planning for Food Pantry Project
Feb 21st, 2008 by Mark Spahr
I am on school vacation this week, but I am also working. Because of the nature of my facility (juvenile corrections), the students don’t get to go home, even though the teachers are on vacation . So it works out that I am able to come in and work to build up some extra time off for when my wife has our second child at the end of March. The administration is graciously flexible with us from time to time. Incarceration can have some benefits I suppose!
One of the things I have been working on this week is the planning for our class project to make bread for the local food pantry. I had a conversation with our facility chaplain yesterday about our plans. He works with the food pantry. He told me that when you add up the number of people in the families who are clients of the food bank they are serving over 500 people a week! This is an incredible number of people when you consider that the food bank is located is a small rural town in Maine.
Some of the things I am planning on having my students do:
- I am going to set up a class wiki to collect and store information, and as a space to collaborate . Because of the unique security concerns we have at our facility, I am not sure if we will be able to do this on Wikispaces or other site. I use Noteshare as a pseudo-wiki in my afternoon class. This is not perfect, but I have reasonably complete control over it.
- One of the things the chaplain requested is that we develop an ingredient list including amounts based on making 100 loaves of bread at a time. My students will need to learn how to use the Baker’s Percentage.
- Once they have scaled the recipe, the students will need to test it out. We can do this using ingredients I already have and send the bread over to be served in the facility dining hall.
- After the recipe is developed, I would like to include nutritional information with each loaf. I found a good, free site to do this.
- NutritionData.com has a huge data base of ingredients that you can use to analyze recipes for their nutritional content.
Once you have entered in the ingredients and their amounts, it also creates professional looking nutrition fact label, just like you would find on any food product in a store.
- I am going to ask my students to create a proposal to present to the administration, outlining what we want to do and how we want to do it. My hope is that this will be some type of multimedia presentation.
- Since we will need to have the raw ingredients donated to the food bank for us to bake into bread, we may ask some of the food service companies, like Sysco, to donate to the project. If we go this route, I will have the students calculate the cost to make 100 loaves of bread. Then we will take that information and create a proposal/presentation to take to the food service companies.
I am interested to see if we are going to be able to pull this off. I will be updating as things are worked on or changed.
Chef, why not call your food pantry project “Bake It Forward”? As you know, I have suggested on several occasions that culinary donate its leftover baked goods to local food cupboards. Our students duly noticed when items were tossed out because they had taken personal pride in following recipes and baking fine products. These at risk youth had experienced emotional engagement in their learning!
The time is right to move forward. A lot of things are coming together here at Mountain View to aid in the development of the project: we have a new JMG Coordinator who is eager to get to know his students, our chaplain is on board and knows where donated ingredients can come from for bread baking, your morning classes have JMG students exclusively, and a local food pantry needs baked goods.
As we continue to endure this rugged Maine winter, we should think of helping those in need. So I say, “Bake It Forward.” I hope the administration of our facility agrees.