Cooking project to tackle obesity gets six figure funding boost

3rd February 2010, 8:21am

A project to tackle obesity and encourage healthy eating in Telford and Wrekin has been given a £200,000 boost to ensure the scheme carries on for at least three years and reaches people all over the borough.

Let's Cook Together courses have already been attended by more than 200 parents and children taking part in 32 separate courses.

Now the project has received funding to ensure it can continue for the next three years and will also be able to buy a "cooking bus" to enable it to reach rural areas of Telford and Wrekin and schools that have no kitchens.

The cash has come from School Food Trust Food Excellence and Skills Training (FEAST) capital fund and NHS Telford and Wrekin.

Let's Cook Together aims to promote cooking as a fun activity that can be enjoyed with all the family and enable both adults and their children to gain an insight into their own health and well-being in the process.

The project will now be funded to the tune of £33,000 a year with the cost of buying and running the bus on top of that. Telford & Wrekin Council's cabinet has given the green light for the authority's catering and cleaning team to buy the bus.

The bus will be used to take mobile cooking classes to schools in rural areas that currently have no kitchen facilities like Edgmond, Tibberton, Coalbrookdale, Preston St Lawrence and Church Aston.

Councillor Clive Mollett, assistant cabinet member for children and young people, said: "The feedback we have had from people who took part in courses during the first year is that they are now eating more healthily as well as cooking more interesting and nutritional meals and this will only increase as the project continues during the coming years.

"The cooking bus will be an invaluable additional resource that will enable the project to reach people in the borough's more rural areas as well as those who are not able to attend courses at fixed sites."

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