On the 9th of July, the first ‘Newham Healthy Food Festival’ was organised by Councillor Rohima Rahman in active partnership with a number of local businesses and community members. This event was well attended by local residents, community members and local leaders. The Festival combined activities for all the family, ranging from local enterprise stalls to impressive displays of fruit and vegetable carving, and cultural performances for everyone to enjoy.
MRC HNR’s Sizzling Science was invited to attended the Festival to deliver a nutrition & cookery demonstration titled ‘Sizzling Science With Added Spice’. This event provided an opportunity for us to deliver key nutrition and health messages directly to the South Asian community, and to show that healthy food can be tasty food. For our nutrition & cookery demonstration HNR teamed up with colleagues from the University of Cambridge (Minha Rajput-Ray), Masterchef India Winner Pankaj Bhadouria and Newham Tutor Rama Rajput to provide a presentation and demonstration similar to that successfully held in Cambridge on 6th July. This event enabled Sizzling Science to deliver the nutrition and health messages in our demonstration in a number of languages, and in a manner that is suitable for a culturally diverse audience.
In order for the Festival to encourage healthy cooking practices in the community, local businesses participated in a ‘healthy platter’ competition. This was judged against an agreed scoring criteria by HNR nutritionist Glenys Jones, Masterchef Pankaj and Cllr Rahman, with participants agreeing to incorporate healthier cooking practices into their restaurant menus.
We are very pleased to be able to report that the Festival and the ‘Sizzling Science with Added Spice’ show received extremely positive press coverage by the British-South Asian media, including Radio and TV channels. This therefore provides far reaching dissemination of health messages to members of the UK South Asian community.
Our thanks go to the Newham Healthy Food Festival for inviting Sizzling Science to partake in their event and to all those who supported the Festival and made it a success. The evening was made possible due to the help of a large number of volunteers from MRC HNR, and through the Cambridge-India Partnership funding Pankaj’s travel to the UK.
To read more about MRC HNR, Pankaj and the Cambridge-India Partnership please visit their websites at:
MRC Human Nutrition Research
Pankaj Bhadouria website
Cambridge-India Partnership
Recipes:
Egg Kebab
Chicken (No) Butter Masala
Fish Moily Not Oily
Gatte ki Subzi
Rainbow Poshto (Vegetables in Poppy Paste)
Fruit Sandesh with No Added Sugar
Sizzling Science with Added Spice also presented in Cambridge. To read about this event please click here.
Sizzling Science is a Knowledge Exchange and Transfer (KET) activity devised by the Communications team at MRC HNR and started in 2009. Since then we have teamed up with different chefs and partners to deliver this format to a wide range of audiences.
For Sizzling Science with Added Spice we had the pleasure of joining forces with Chef Pankaj Bhadouria to help communicate our messages to the South Asian community in particular. This event was co-ordinated by Glenys Jones at MRC HNR, with Sumantra Ray from MRC HNR/University of Cambridge and his wife Minha Rajput-Ray (University of Cambridge) having conceived the idea of bringing Pankaj to the UK during a recent trip to India, and then being fortunate enough to obtain a grant from the Cambridge-India Partnership fund to make her travel to the UK a possibility.
Sir Richard is the President of the Royal College of Physicians and is an Emeritus Consultant Gastroenterologist at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Hospital in London.
