In Photos: VIU culinary students cook up community service

Culinary Arts students at VIU Cowichan recently served up a multitude of soups with a side of community spirit.

It was all a part of the program’s Soup Challenge – a two-day event that brings together flavour, creativity and skill to give back to the community in a unique way.

Soup ingredients – which otherwise would have simply been thrown away – are donated by Loaves and Fishes Nanaimo. Students don’t know what’s coming their way and their challenge is to make as much soup as possible out of the ingredients that have been made available.

Once the soups are created, the Cowichan Green Community distributes the soup to community members in need. 

“Students were surprised that the food we were given was of such good quality and would have been composted if the Loaves and Fishes Food Recovery program didn’t pick it up and deliver it to people in need,"  says VIU Cowichan Culinary Instructor Francois de Jong.

In creating the soup, students followed a “method-based approach” to creating the soups said de Jong. Essentially, this meant “problem-solving their way through the variety of products they had to choose from every morning.”

In total, this year’s students created 45 different kinds of soup, totalling 345.4 litres.

“I love the layers of learning that happen with this classroom experience,” de Jong adds.