Columbia students Chloe Clifford, Isaiah Orozco, Dylan Connely, and Osvaldo Guerrero-Cortez taste and judge a plate of pasta primavera during last Friday’s Locavore Challenge.
Columbia students Chloe Clifford, Isaiah Orozco, Dylan Connely, and Osvaldo Guerrero-Cortez taste and judge a plate of pasta primavera during last Friday’s Locavore Challenge.
Student chefs competed last Friday at Columbia High School’s Locavore Challenge, which pitted teams of two and three against each other in a competition to determine which dish stood up to the standards of Ms. Caitlin Cray’s health class.
Six teams competed for the top spot in the Locavore Challenge, where each group were required to prepare a delicious and nutritious dish using fresh, local, and organically grown produce.
Students were scored based on their dish’s taste and appearance, as well as for the group’s work habits, including how well they demonstrated safety, communication, division of labor, and clean up in the kitchen.
The rules are simple. Each group must include spinach, scallions, and asparagus in the dish. No meat can be used, and bonus points are awarded if all ingredients were grown within 300 miles of White Salmon.
The kitchens at Columbia High School were ablaze with energy Friday morning as students rushed to complete their dish, have it judged, and clean up their workstations by the end of class.
The team that took first place consisted of seniors Tobias Nichols and Malachi Falle, who cooked up a vegetarian stir-fry dish.
Columbia High School student Kylie Adams concentrates as she flips an egg during the Locavore Challenge last Friday.
Jacob Bertram photo
“I have a lot of good memories from my childhood with stir-fry,” Nichols said, explaining they cooked it “millions of times.”
Second place, including Brendan Donica and Calvin Rogers, prepared a Greek omelet, and third place, consisting of Helen Hoskins, Charlie Ebbert, and Madeline Ayer, demonstrated their skills preparing a pasta primavera.
Cray said this year marks the first time the Locavore Challenge has happened in-person since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since beginning the contest in 2015, Cray has made it her goal through the contest and in her daily teaching to educate students about the importance of eating locally.
“We live in an extraordinary place for having food year-round,” she said. “So many students even in this semi-rural area was not connected to what’s seasonal.”
She figured that teaching students sustainability was a more tangible, and thus more effective way, to teach nutrition.
While no meat is allowed at the contest for food safety purposes, the reason Cray requires vegetables on the dish is teach students the importance of filling your plate with veggies, especially hearty greens.
Cray said throughout her course, students perform their own research into nutrition to be able to find valid and reliable sources of information, and one thing studies make clear, Cray said, is that “the one thing that could make a difference (in heart disease, high blood pressure, and other co-morbidities) is if people ate more plants.”
During the more restrictive days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cray continued on her project, delivering fresh produce and ingredients herself to students at home, some of whom had never seen her in person before. But this year was the first year since the pandemic where local industry people were invited to judge, as well as upperclassmen who had taken the course previously.
As this year’s Locavore Challenge comes to a close, Cray commented that she has a vision of taking The Locavore Challenge region-wide. She said she hopes that other schools and clubs sign on and compete with her class. She is looking for a partner school to participate.
She said each year, many kids who do this contest form a camaraderie with their group partners, kids who might not normally hang out together. She sees pride in their faces from the work they have accomplished.
“The magic of sharing food makes some social connections that doesn’t seem to happen elsewhere,” she said.
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