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Since its inception in 1997, Midwest Food Resources has been organizing cooking groups to help families eat well cost effectively, and now they are ready to start a cooking group for people with health concerns like celiac disease.

Executive Director Debbie Bonsan says there are already people interested, so with a few more members a group could be started up right away.

Meanwhile, regular cooking groups are ongoing. They make up an important component of Midwest Food Resources programming.

Midwest Food Resources is a non-profit registered charity run by a volunteer board of directors. Having first offered collective kitchen programs in the Battlefords, it expanded to Lloydminster, Meadow Lake and Turtleford in its second year.

In addition to cooking groups for adult, there are similar groups for children, homemade baby food workshops, a fresh food box program, food war challenges and a community gardening program.

"We're all about food and fun," says Bonsan.

Celebrating food is part of every culture, she points out.

The goal of Midwest Food Resources is to bring healthy food experiences to all. For many, eating well can be difficult, sometimes impacted by the cost and availability of healthy foods as well as a need for cooking skills.

That's where the collective kitchen program comes in.

How many adult cooking groups run at any given time depends on interest.

"Right now there's a lot," says Bonsan. "We have three groups meeting twice a month."

Participants fill out a questionnaire to help determine what they want to achieve by joining a cooking group. Some might want to "get in and out as fast as they can," while others might want to "hang out and have a good time cooking."

Once the group comes together, they determine amongst themselves what their goal will be, and a staff member facilitates.

"We really let the group decide what that group is going to be like and what their core goals are, and then we facilitate them reaching their goals as a group," says Bonsan.

Bonsan says they will talk about things such as likes and dislikes, allergies and health concerns, then decide what the group wants to learn, what foods they want to make and how to make healthy food choices. Next, they go together to shop for ingredients. (Some of the basic items, such as flour, oil and seasoning are supplied from Midwest Food Resource's "library" stocked with staples, pots and pans and other items.)

At the grocery store, the group talks about how to save money and how to choose the most cost-conscious of the healthy foods. Then they go back to the cooking facility, prepare their food, and take it home to their families.

Typically, the cost is $4 for each family member who will be sharing the food.

"Our groups are sometimes coming in way under budget and they are making an astonishing amount of food," says Bonsan. "I am really impressed because food has gone up in price a lot recently, so I really think that by having those budgeting skills you can still eat really, really well."

Of course, says Bonsan, it's not just about nutrition and budgets. It's also about having fun.

"There's something about cooking together, tasting food together and eating together that is the basis of all cultures, that is just fun and social and a way of expressing a really creative part of ourselves," says Bonsan. "We don't always have time to celebrate food the way we do in the cooking group."

People will often be dancing around the kitchen and laughing, says Bonsan. It's a fun social outing.

The ideal group size is five or six, she says. Since they are cooking for their families, they may be making 100 servings per group.

"Because we are not caterers, just regular people making food for our families, at some point it becomes too big, says Bonsan. Eight would be the maximum number that would work, she says.

Often the cooking is done at Trinity Baptist Church, with whom Midwest partners. Some of the other local churches let them use their facilities as well, says Bonsan.

Midwest Food Resources also holds cooking groups for children with their Kids in the Kitchen program, mostly in partnership with the Boys and Girls Clubs and schools in the community. The location rotates weekly amongst these partners. They have also held them at the Indian and M茅tis Friendship Centre, says Bonsan.

The Fresh Food Box program is also one of Midwest Food Resources most successful ventures. The program is open to anyone, at all income levels, says Bonsan. It's an easy way to add more fruits and vegetables to a family's diet. It's an area of nutrition where many people are lacking. (Six per cent of adults eat less than the five recommended servings of fruit and vegetables daily.)

The Fresh Food Box program makes health eating convenient. Each box comes with a combination of fresh fruit, vegetables, grains and a newsletter about what might be done with the contents.

"It's almost like a personal shopping service, but everybody's getting the same thing," says Bonsan.

The boxes are put together at Living Faith Chapel, another Midwest Food Resources partner. Volunteers fill the boxes and a staff person "pulls it all together."

The boxes are prepared on an order basis. Most often it's businesses, schools or organizations that collect all the orders from their establishment, drop them off at the office, then send someone to pick them up when they are ready, delivering them back to the membership, school or workplace.

It's an effective way for businesses to encourage healthy eating amongst their employees, she says.

"You can access groceries at work," says Bonsan. "It's super easy!"

An added bonus is that the Fresh Food Box program often involves people who don't typically or traditionally volunteer, she says.

The Fresh Food Box program also supports local grocers and growers, is environmentally friendly because it comes in cases and goes out in boxes, saves time and reduces travel.

At $10 or $15 a box, Bonsan sees it as a good value.

The food is all purchased from local grocers and local growers.

"We support all the people providing food in our community."

Because people are paying for their own food through Midwest Food Resources programs, the group does not call for donations of food (although funding is always welcome). For those who want to donate food, a donation to the food bank is more appropriate, says Bonsan. However, they sometimes "rescue" food.

"We did a harvest rescue last fall," says Bonsan. They partnered with homeowners who were unable to make their own harvest, picked it and put it in the fresh food boxes. If people have fruit they can't pick because they are ill, have had surgery or are in a similar situation, Midwest can be contacted about partnering the harvest.

One of Midwest's newest programs, now into its fifth year, is a community garden project.

The gardening project is exciting, says Bonsan. It's popular enough that they've had to downsize some of the plots this year to accommodate more gardeners. There will be more than 10 plots this year so it's probably time to expand the area available.

The garden is located on Gagne Avenue, using land provided by the City of North Battleford.

Many of the gardeners live in apartments, says Bonsan, and some come from other countries where they are used to coming out of the city centre to have a garden plot.

"People who want to grow all their food and preserve it for the winter can do that in our garden spots," says Bonson. Although they may be scaling down, they are still large plots, says Bonsan, so you need to be a committed gardener.

"It's also very community building to have a garden," she says.

The gardeners help each other out and give each other some great ideas, says Bonsan, and several times over the growing season Midwest Food Resources organizes a volunteer work bee to do quack grass control and weed reduction in the shared areas, such as the paths and perimeter. More volunteers are always welcome. They are looking for people to help once a week or once a month for an hour or two in the evening. (A volunteer work bee also includes supper.)

"We started having our garden meetings in March this year to have some sort of process for people to engage and create some parameters around the gardening," says Bonsan. "Each gardener signs a form saying they won't use chemicals, will keep track of how much food they grow, what they do with it and report that back to us."

For the most part the gardeners bring their own seed, although leftovers are put in the shed at the garden for others to use as well.

This year Bonsan says they hope to add some shared crop, such as rhubarb or raspberries.

Midwest Food Resources receives funding from such sources as the City of North Battleford, Battlefords Area Tribal Chiefs Community Development Corporation, the Ministry of Education's Child Nutrition and Development program, the provincial Community Initiative Fund and TD Friends of the Environment.

The staff numbers two part time plus Bonsan in the North Battleford office and a part-time person each in Meadow Lake and Lloydminster, where there are also adult and children's cooking programs.

Midwest Food Resources has recently moved into new premises at 10202-11th Ave., relocating from across the street in the Miami Tanning building.

"They were wonderful to us, but we needed more space," say Bonson.

The new office is also more easily found and more visible.