Tasmanian Bush Food Garden to Plate

• Using a bush food garden and Aboriginal stories to promote community connections, healthy eating and active lifestyles.
• Focusing on children aged 0-5 and their families.

The Tasmanian Bush Food to Plate project is an innovative partnership between the Bridgewater-based tagari lia Child and Family Centre and the Child Health Association Tasmania.

The project is an exciting community partnership which promotes the use of Tasmanian bush foods in everyday, healthy recipes while sharing and building knowledge, awareness and respect of Aboriginal history and culture.

As well as introducing the Aboriginal stories associated with the use of the bush foods, the program increased parents’ confidence of what to use from the bush garden and the types of everyday healthy food recipes to incorporate bush foods into cooking for their children. Recipes included Mountain Pepper Chicken Adobo, tagari lia’s Tukka Dukka Chicken Satays, and Wattle Seed Crunchy Cups with Fruit Sorbet.

Participants also had the opportunity to build skills and knowledge on how to incorporate bush foods into their own gardens and in harvesting.

New networks were developed with Aboriginal Education Services, Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, Love in a Lunchbox, Sustainability Learning Centre, Kempton Primary School, local Launching into Learning groups and the Jordan River Learning Federation Brighton Farm.

The project also resulted in increased connections with and interest from some local schools along with a desire to establish stronger working relationships with the centre, as well as opportunities to further develop working relationships with other early childhood learning centres.

An additional benefit to the program was the increased job readiness of participants who had completed the food preparation component of the course. By the end of the course 70 per cent of participants were considered to be job ready to work in food preparation, and one participant had updated her resume to include the new skills acquired through the program to actively seek employment.

Links

• Child Health Association Tasmania website
• Child Health Association Tasmania Facebook page
• tagari lia Facebook page
• Bush food garden to plate project launched at child and family centre (Brighton Community News 29 March 2018)
• State of Public Health 2018 (includes Grant stories)

image: Tasmanian Bush Food Garden to Plate: making tagari lia’s Tukka Dukka Chicken Satays.