Fruit and Veg Competition

Date: Wednesday 26 November 2008

At lunchtime today PK Produce, the School’s supplier of fruit and veg for the past seven years, set up a most attractive display of fruit and vegetables in the dining hall and ran a fascinating educational challenge for the children.

With the objective of encouraging a curiosity about where the fruit and veg on our plates originates, and to point up the issue of ‘food miles’, the children were invited to identify 18 different fruits and vegetables and to decide whether they were grown in Britain or abroad. For the older pupils the challenge was to guess in which country each product was grown and how many miles it had travelled to reach Canterbury. There was asparagus from Peru, 6,500 miles away and cauliflower from Thanet, 16 miles away; sweet potatoes from Israel and leeks from Staplehurst and so on. Well done all those who took on the challenge!

Then there was the fascinating PK Produce Did You Know? sheet. Did you know for example that:

• 65% of all apples eaten in England are imported from abroad?
• apples float because 25% of their volume is air?
• there are more than 7,000 varieties of apple grown in the world?
• vitamin A helps your body fight infection and keeps your skin and hair healthy?
• there are over 38,000 mushroom varieties, not all of them edible?
• The first frost of the year converts the parsnip’s starch to sugar and gives it a pleasantly sweet flavour?

It is the School’s policy to buy as much locally grown food as possible in order to cut down on ‘food miles’ and PK Produce, a Kent-based company, sources as much of its produce as possible locally.