Challenge’, whereby groups of students compete good-naturedly against each other.
By Victoria Cosford
Growing wheat, turning it into flour, then making bread. Creating seed-raising pots out of newspapers. Constructing hotels for bees and frogs. Raising crops of rain-fed rice. Making beeswax wraps and chook tractors.
These are just some of the exciting, innovative ideas that local primary school children have come up with over the past eight years as part of the annual Grow Your Own Lunchbox event. An initiative of the Mullumbimby Farmers Market, it was launched in 2015 and, barring a three-year break necessitated by Covid and the floods, has been eagerly anticipated – and planned for – each year since then.
Around seven Byron Shire schools participate, coming together on the day to showcase the hard work and preparation they have poured into it. The brief was to encourage schools to create gardens in order that children could grow their own food, understand its provenance, and find ways to transform it into meals or preserves or pickles. The actual day culminates in the Grow Your Own Lunchbox Challenge, whereby groups of students compete good-naturedly against each other to come up with a healthy lunch box on the spot, using as ingredients the produce sourced from their own gardens.
Here, too, over the years, the results have been impressive: frittatas, Vietnamese rice paper rolls, and orange polenta cupcakes, have been produced alongside lamb on rosemary skewers with flatbreads, cassava cake, sweet potato crisps with ginger and turmeric hummus, mulberry muesli bars, and herb-infused salts and oils.
In addition, the schools must compete in categories for a box of vegetables from the school garden; for preserved, pickled or dried products; and for garden fundraising ideas.
Over the course of a Friday morning in the glorious grounds of the Mullumbimby Farmers Market, these resourceful children – future farmers? future chefs? – engage in amicable rivalry, share the fruits of their kitchen gardens and their stories, and highlight the importance of healthy, local and fresh food.
This year’s event is on Friday, 6 September at the Mullumbimby Farmers Market, which is on every Friday from 7am to 11am.
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