Healthy food is easy to provide when you have enough money. However, to make nutritious food for the family when money is tight, one has to be very smart when sourcing the ingredients. The aim of the healthy cooking class and the “Morning Bite” project is to encourage the “Kricak” families to make healthier choices. When this was raised in a mothers’ meeting, the women asked to be taught healthy international recipes.
The healthy cooking class was an introduction, in which our international volunteers showed the parents how to cook recipes from their own countries, with an Indonesian twist of course! PCI compiled a cookbook with the new recipes with locally sourced ingredients, with an indication of the price per meal on each page. The parents learned that they could cook food in alternative ways to retain its nutrition and minimise the amount of added oil and sugar, thus keeping within the same daily budget.
In order to build upon the growing education in this area, PCI is implementing the “Morning Bite” program. This program aims to provide a healthy alternative for breakfast once or twice a week, to demonstrate that it is possible to source this kind of breakfast for a low cost. Depending on the momentum of the “Morning Bite” project, PCI may micro-finance some mothers to continue the ‘healthy breakfast point’ businesses independently.
