Junior chefs compete in culinary cook off launching Canada-wide healthy-eating school campaign, WE Eat Well

-WE Eat Well, a free school campaign, empowers young people across Canada to learn about nutrition and spread awareness about the benefits of making nutritious food choices. -

TORONTO, Jan. 15, 2019 /CNW/ - Today, WE and PC Children's Charitytm launch a free national school campaign, WE Eat Well. Made possible by PC Children's Charitytm, WE Eat Well provides students coast to coast with the tools they need to discover the benefits of healthy eating, explore nutritious alternatives and share their learnings with friends, family and their school.

From organizing a class trip to examine nutritious food options at the grocery store to sharing healthy snack options with friends, the campaign is designed to encourage young people to create action plans in the classroom to bring healthy eating to life at school, at home and in the community.

The WE Eat Well campaign kicked off with a cooking competition serving three teams of five junior chefs with the opportunity to put their nutrition and culinary skills to the test. The chefs, aged nine to twelve, came together for a culinary showdown joined by judges including internationally-renowned activist and WE co-founder, Marc Kielburger, President of Loblaw Companies Ltd. and Chair of PC Children's Charitytm, Sarah Davis, as well as Executive Director of PC Children's Charitytm, Lisa Battistelli. 

"As Canada's largest funder of school meal programs, we're reaching almost 400,000 students daily with access to healthy food" said Lisa Battistelli, Executive Director of PC Children's Charitytm. "In addition to feeding kids, PC Children's Charitytm is committed to putting the power of food in the hands of Canadian children through food-based education. We know that kids who eat well, do well, that's where Healthy Food for Healthy Bodies and the WE Eat Well campaign come in."

Through their participation in WE Eat Well, the junior chefs developed an appetite for healthy eating and learned cooking tricks to kick their dishes up a notch. With mentorship from Chef Tom Filippou, Executive Chef of President's Choice and WE Eat Well cooking competition host, and Alexis Williams, Sr. Director of Wellness and lead Dietician at Loblaw Companies Ltd., the chefs put a spin on classic breakfast dishes and transformed them into nutritious new favourites. In under an hour, the chefs shopped for their ingredients, sliced, mixed and cooked their way to preparing a healthy breakfast dish for judging. Scored based on taste, nutrition and teamwork, the judges crowned George Kennedy Public School the winner of the inaugural WE Eat Well culinary cook off. Access photos from the event here. 

"It was so powerful to see these students turn their service learning into meaningful action," said Marc Kielburger, co-founder of WE. "They represent such an important part of a movement made up of more than 1.9 million change-makers dedicated to making a difference. Using their voices to drive awareness around nutrition will have such a positive impact, and I'm tremendously excited to see how WE Eat Well continues to inspire young people to make healthy living a part of their everyday."

WE Eat Well is part of WE Schools, WE's free domestic service-learning program, which engages over 7,000 school and youth groups Canada wide in creating meaningful change. WE Schools not only motivates students to learn more about social issues they are passionate about through cause-based curriculum and content, but also guides them through the process to develop an action plan to create meaningful change. In the 2017/2018 school year, Canadian youth collectively volunteered 4.4 million hours in support of both local and global causes.

In 2017, PC Children's Charitytm made a commitment of $150 million over the next 10 years to tackle childhood hunger. The Charity does this by feeding and educating children across Canada.  Working in hand with WE Eat Well, WE and PC Children's Charitytm created Healthy Food for Healthy Bodies, a classroom resource that provides educators with provincial-approved curriculum framework to seamlessly integrate nutrition-focused activities into everyday lesson plans. Available in both English and French, the curriculum resource is available for classes from Kindergarten to Grade 8. 

For more information about WE Eat Well, Healthy Food for Healthy Bodies and to learn how to incorporate the campaign into the classroom, visit WE.org/weeatwell.

About PC Children's Charitytm
PC Children's Charitytm was founded in 1989 to help children across Canada, and since that time has granted more than $175 million, supporting more than 4 million children.  The charity believes access to good food and food education provides a foundation for children to learn and grow, improving their well-being and empowering them to make a positive contribution to the world around them.  The charity offers funding across Canada and dollars are granted in the region in which they are raised. For more information or to donate online, visit pc.ca/charity.

About WE
WE is a family of organizations that makes doing good, doable. WE is made up of WE Charity, empowering domestic and international change, ME to WE, a social enterprise that creates socially conscious products and experiences to help support the charity, and WE Day, filling stadiums around the world with the greatest celebration of social good. WE enables youth and families to better the world ? supporting 7,200+ local and global causes by volunteering millions of hours of service, shopping daily with an impact, and raising millions of dollars that directly benefit their local communities and the world. Globally, our teams in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have provided more than 1 million people with clean water, built 1,000 schools and schoolrooms overseas, and empowered more than 200,000 children with access to education. WE was founded more than 20 years ago by social entrepreneurs, brothers Craig and Marc Kielburger. Join the movement today at WE.org.

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