The Mission:FoodPossible (M:FP) programme, which trains community members and schools how to maximise food resources, is expanding to four primary schools in Portland. This move by M:FP follows a pilot programme which began in October 2018 at the St John’s Primary School in St Catherine.

The announcement was made by the founder of M:FP, Peter Ivey, who is a Jamaican chef and entrepreneur living and working in New York.

The 36-year-old owner of The Reggae Chefs, a personalised chef service that specialises in the fusion of Jamaican food and culture to promote and preserve the island’s culture, was recently featured in Forbes magazine for his efforts in the area of food sustainability in Jamaica.

“Food insecurity and hunger are at the heart of this programme,” said the chef who himself was once homeless in New York as an undocumented immigrant between the ages of 19 – 23.

The aim of M:FP is to alleviate hunger among Jamaicans by teaching them more ways to utilise foods that are cheap and readily available. Such foods are referred to as MVP’s (most valuable produce) by the M:FP organisation.

Another objective of the programme is to prevent farmers’ produce going to waste. These two aims go hand in hand Ivey believes.

“If more people are knowledgeable about additional ways of cooking and making use of a particular food, farmers will be able to sell more of that food and avoid wastage from surplus.

“If we can shift the way people consume food then it affects the farmer,” insisted the M:FP founder.

M:FP began its mission in Jamaica by feeding approximately 700 people in 2017 at a community-based event.

“You see the callaloo we used in that programme, it was a farmer who misjudged the harvest and had excess callaloo,” Ivey said to underscore his point about not letting food go to waste.

Last year M:FP commenced the next phase of its work which was to bring the programme to schools.

“Mission:FoodPossible is a two-track programme — community and school,” Ivey explained.

“On the school track, we go in and train the canteen staff to cook with what we call Jamaica’s MVPs. Remember at the heart of Mission:FoodPossible is our scoring guide, which is what we use to rank Jamaica’s most valuable produce. So we go in and we train the staff at these schools to cook innovative dishes, healthy dishes, using the foods that we know and love, the MVPs.”

“At St John’s a lot of the parents were farmers in the community so a lot of the produce was donated by parents in the area,” Ivey elaborated. “It is excess produce that might have gone to waste.”

An evaluation process to assess the effectiveness of the programme among students has already started.

“We put students on the programme who were not being served by other school meal programmes and whose academic performances were inconsistent,” said Ivey. “Just this week we got the first set of data and the rest is supposed to come to me next week. We will be looking at attendance before and after the start of the programme as well as progress in academics.”

The M:FP training initiative, which is being taken to Portland, involves the Buff Bay Primary School, Skibo Primary School, Charles Town Primary School, and Bybrook Primary School in October.

“From October 17-19, we will be in Portland for training the canteen of four primary schools at the same time and that will culminate with an event for the community based on what we taught the kitchen staff, showing recipes to the community and having the community sample dishes that we have created with their MVPs,” Ivey revealed.

The data from the St John’s Primary School programme will be used to make improvements or changes where necessary as M:FP spreads its wings. However, Ivey warns that in the long term the mission cannot be successful without additional financial assistance from other sources.

“Funding and support are critical,” he stated.

“The school training programme is only a pilot programme to show Jamaica, to show the ministries and various government stakeholders that if you are serious about stimulating agriculture we have to put these things in place at the ground level for children to start eating what we grow and eating the foods that we know and love.”

Ivey gave an example of the kind of knowledge that will be imparted to the citizens of Portland.

“We are going to Portland and we don’t even need our scoring guide to know that breadfruit is a valuable produce to Portland, but when we went to Portland the other day to do our initial research we realised that most people in the parish only know about three ways to prepare breadfruit — roast, boiled and fried,” he pointed out.

“We can teach people how to use the breadfruit in six additional ways to extend its life and reduce wastage of the produce,” he continued enthusiastically.

“Additionally, in times of disaster, M:FP training can teach you additional ways to use and maximise the food that is available to you.”

Ivey is hoping that not just the Government but other organisations in Jamaica will recognise the value of M:FP and the contribution to food sustainability it can make on the island.

“If you know what other parts of the world are doing with food that we can now take to apply to our agriculture and produce, it is amazing,” he said.

“There is no food shortage in Jamaica. What there is, is a shortage of knowledge in utilising the abundance of food that we have. Mangoes would no longer litter the ground if we knew what we could do with mangoes.”