Polytech students rejoice: thousands of frozen meals are winging their way to your flats, dreamt up and prepared by a team of staff and students.
The project began with Polytech senior lecturer Tony Hepinstall, who started the initiative as “a social enterprise where students could give back to their peers.” With many students being in isolation, and unable to properly shop for groceries or cook, they’ve been forced to rely on food delivery services or stock up on frozen meals. The issue, said Tony, was that frozen meals are expensive - $7 to $8 a piece. Gazing on the fluorescent blue boxes in his flat freezer, he had an epiphany: “We can do better food at a cheaper price.”
A quick call to the Polytech’s Student Success team later, they were on their way. Bachelor of Culinary Arts students developed a menu of 14 dishes, from pumpkin and kumara soup to lasagna, meatballs, mac and cheese and chicken to tofu Pad Thai. A “ghost kitchen” was set up, which is culinary-speak for a kitchen preparing food which is then served somewhere else. These meals were then cooked up, packed and frozen for delivery to isolating Polytech students. Around 1,000 meals were prepared in the space of about a week, with an Instagram video showing a slick, factory-like operation cranking out meals from the Polytech kitchens.
“The meals are more comfort food than healthy food,” according to Tony, “but they were all made from scratch”. Satisfyingly, the wholesome student-prepared meals were significantly more affordable, costing around $4.60 each including packaging. But more important than the financial aspects, it was also about manaaki, according to Tony: “making people feel better by receiving our food, [rather than] what we teach through most of the Bachelor of Culinary Arts, which is how to make money out of selling food.”