A taste of Christmas
Fri, 19 Dec 2014 11:32:00 GMT
Year 1 Food and Nutrition students ended 2014 by preparing a traditional festive buffet as part of their Catering for Health module.
Although our Food and Nutrition degrees are not intended to be a cookery course, this module helps to prepare students for careers in which they will provide nutritional advice to consumers, by ensuring that students have basic kitchen skills so they can advise on ways of improving the nutritional quality of meals, such as home cooked alternatives to pre-prepared processed foods. These skills will also be of great use to students who intend to work in food science, in roles such as product development.
Students also take part in sensory evaluation exercises where they are asked to sample and critically evaluate different versions of the same product, such as a home made and supermarket version of a product, and consider how the recipes could be modified to suit different consumers, such as people who have a tighter budget or who have particular dietary requirements.
The “Taste of Christmas” practical gives students an opportunity to put the skills they have learned into practice, creating a number of freshly made Christmas treats which, while not the kind of meal they would recommend eating every day, are still nutritionally better than some of the pre-prepared processed alternatives.
