Discussion Board

Hi there, more on the Chopped Challenge we had this spring.

To celebrate Idaho Family Dinner Night, we invited two local nutritionists who are parents from our school and who also own Simply Nutrition here in the Silver Valley. We asked them if they would be interested in hosting a modified “Chopped Challenge” for families with several embedded goals including:  encourage the value of family time, promote healthy eating, see them try new foods, learn the math/literacy/science of recipes and nutrition labels, and explore how the fields of nutrition, medicine, and culinary come together. During the event, we encouraged our hosts to include a good discussion of what a nutritionist does and their passion was to show how the job affects not just a person or a family, but the community.

We used free materials from Idaho Family Dinner Night for recipe books, handouts and placemats, provided by our school’s Healthy Choices teacher. In the earlier part of the week, we talked about basic nutrition and watched a video while the kids created invitations, made centerpieces for the tables and info-posters to direct families to the room and posters to hang in the room. We promoted it on our Facebook page and in our newsletter. The event drew quite a crowd and was a successful family engagement night.

With so many different families and personalities, we wanted to avoid outright competition but still have an element of excitement similar to competitors in the “Chopped Challenge” as seen on the television show. After introductions and some housekeeping details, our nutritionists became the hosts. They showed how to read labels & recipes, see the average cost of ingredients and nutritional value, learn about the balanced food plate, and then encouraged each individual to make a dinner salad using the ingredients provided. Some of our kids gloved up and were servers alongside the hosts and some of our staff. Two of our staff took pictures of everyone with their salads. The hosts then “judged” the salads as people were eating, by commenting on how colorful they were, how much variety was included, how creative and appealing the arrangement of the salad was, etc. It was pretty cool to see how many kids and adults tried something new - and liked it!

We paid a professional fee to have them in and they donated some of the food. We purchased the remainder of the food in part with donations and got more donations for door prizes. Then, we raffled off door prizes as people were eating their salads. One of our gregarious kiddos won the homemade apron, and you’d have thought he won a sports car! At cleanup, one little lady just had to have the “PASS Chopped Challenge” sign off the wall to take home. Quite honestly, we were surprised and so glad for the success of this event. It was a lot of fun.