Pear Tree’s Hot Lunch Program 🍽️: 37 dishes in one year!

Published on: May 9, 2022

by Paul Romani (M.Ed.)

In May, Pear Tree students get to vote on the June menu from a poll of their favourite dishes across the school year.

Between September 2021 and May 2022, our students ate a total of 37 different dishes!

To most people reading this, it might sound crazy to think that Pear Tree’s healthy hot lunch program is one of the most popular features of our school. However, we are incredibly proud of this!

At Pear Tree School, we treat physical development as being equally important as academic or socio-emotional development. Physical development includes both P.E. classes and our hot lunch program.

Everything is interconnected. You are what you eat. This is why it baffles me how any school can (claim to) strive for academic excellence if it ignores healthy eating as being a compulsory part of its program!

At Pear Tree, every student must participate in our healthy hot lunch program.

As such, when parents and students rave about our hot lunch program as much as they do our classes or P.E. program, we know that we are achieving our goals.

Student Choice Menu

For June, Pear Tree students take part in a poll where they choose their favourite 5 dishes in different categories: vegetarian, legumes, from the sea, from the land, and Friday funday.

The most popular dish in each category will form the June ‘Student Choice’ menu to wrap up the year.

The primary emphasis of our healthy hot lunch program is on vegetarian food, though there are still a good variety of meat and fish dishes included. This emphasis on vegetarian food recognises the importance of the nutritional needs of children, and how they do not require the same level of protein intake as adults. It also takes into consideration growing global awareness of the environmental harm caused by livestock farming, as well as its ethical concerns.

Menu Quality

As you can see from the images below, Pear Tree’s healthy hot lunch program ticks all of the boxes.

It’s nutritious, culturally diverse, and beautifully presented – all thanks to our in-house, Red Seal Level 3 chef, Borja Serrano.

Chef Borja has his own Instagram page, which currently hosts over 150 lunches and snacks that he has prepared for our students since starting with us. Check out his Instagram page here: https://www.instagram.com/onebitebeforeyoucry/