Inuit make soup and square dance their way to healthy lifestyles

After offering classes in healthy cooking and physical activity, the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre compiled some easy recipes for healthy dishes into a cookbook which people are free to download at their website: http://www.ottawainuitchildrens.com/.

OTTAWA — It’s one thing to teach someone that eating well and exercising will help sustain a healthy lifestyle. It’s quite another to teach that person how to shop, cook and stay active in a practical way.

Thanks to a $23,000 grant from Ontario’s Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport in the summer of 2012, the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre did just that with cooking classes, Inuit games and square dancing this past year.

“It is easy to cook with healthy choices,” said Janice Messam, who helped organize activities under the program. “We know we’re limited. We want to work with $50 of groceries. What can you make that’s healthy, that you can make in large quantities to freeze and eat over several weeks?”

The provincial grant required recipients to offer programs that promote healthy eating and physical activity.

But OICC staff know that many Inuit clients who access programs at the centre can’t afford expensive sports programs for their kids and they don’t want to fill their cupboards and fridges with exotic ingredients they’ll seldom use.

So they focused on practical shopping and cooking for families on a budget and physical activities that are free or at least inexpensive and accessible.

The program alternated each week, offering a healthy eating event one week and physical activity the next, Messam said.

For the food nights, they brought in Ottawa chefs, cooks and specialists to talk about health issues such as diabetes and to offer cooking lessons such as soup-making.

At the end of each night, as a door prize, staff would give away $50 worth of groceries with ingredients that were used in that night’s class and recipes to go with them.

“One night a mom came and she was in tears when she won,” Messam said. “She said she didn’t know how she was going to feed her kids that night. She was so happy to win.”

Messam said most low-income parents resort to buying processed, frozen and fast foods because they are cheap and easy. But they’re also high in fat, sugar and preservatives.

The bi-weekly cooking nights encouraged participants to capitalize on meats and vegetables that are on sale by buying in large quantities and then cooking several dishes at a time.

Attendance to classes varied depending on weather, Messam said, but generally they had eight to 10 participants on most cooking nights.

The square dancing and Inuit games nights were a little more popular, attracting dozens of Inuit from across the city, she said.

According to feedback received, participants really appreciated spending time with members of their community, and taking part in activities that they enjoyed doing up north.

“It was a good program and something I’d like to continue on a regular basis. Maybe not weekly, but regularly,” Messam said.

Staff pulled together an array of simple recipes that they had translated into Inuktitut for a cookbook called We Are Healthy.

The book contains breakfast items, soups, main courses and desserts. You can see and download a copy of the cookbook here.