On the 9th October 2017, we celebrated our Australian Tour to Transform Children’s Health, One Lunchbox At A Time being on the road for TWO WHOLE YEARS. Boy has that gone fast! We have had plenty of ups, and enough downs to build resilience in bucket loads. To say this was a bigger undertaking than we ever expected is an understatement. We have learnt so much, achieved so much, yet there is still so much more to do. Here’s a bit of a look at our Australian Tour – Celebrating Two Years.
Vital Stats
- We’ve reached 77 schools and preschools with The Mad Food Science Program.
- Impacted approx 16,000 people directly through our events.
- Indirectly impacted over 60,000 (using ABS stats for family unit), but we know it goes way beyond this – people tell us how they have taken our message to other groups they are part of.
- Made and served over 900 litres of green smoothies, predominantly to school aged children (we’ve used almost 3,000 Australian bananas!)
- Set up free pop-up events, ran family community events, participated in family health expos, and conducted cooking demonstrations at farmers markets and shopping centres.
- Travelled almost 43,000 kilometres in the bus so far, and about another 40,000 or so in our car too.
- Replaced 12 tyres on the trailer, 1 on the bus, 2 on the car.
- Spent $17,238 on fuel for the bus.
- Spent $28,500 on mechanical repairs for the bus.
- Spent $7,700 on connectivity costs (phone and internet).
- Averaged $60 per week on camp costs by mainly staying at free or low cost camp sites.
- Lost count of how many pluggers we’ve done on our thongs (flip-flops!), and how many hats and drink bottles we’ve left behind.
- We have generated our own electricity with solar panels, and lived happily off the grid, for approx 670 days out of 730.
What Has The Australian Tour Proven?
1 – Empowering Kids To Make Better Food Choices Works
When we set out on our Australian Tour, we wanted to prove the concept that when you empower kids to make better food choices, they will take responsibility for the food they put in their mouth. This then helps make it easier for parents to get kids to eat healthier. Together, children and parents can then work together to make better food choices.
We are so over the moon with the results we have achieved. We feel confident that our concept of empowering kids to make better food choices works. You can see some of the great results we’ve achieved in the next section below: 2 – The Mad Food Science Program Gets Results.
Of course, it’s also shown us that 2 years on the road is just not enough time. We want to – and need to – have a bigger impact to turn around the Titanic-like crisis that children’s health in Australia has become.
Our Australian Tour will end in December 2017 but our Mission to Transform Children’s Health has only just begun.
Hold onto your hats people! Travelling, running workshops, and schooling our own kids takes up a lot of time everyday. When our tour finishes, Israel and I will have time to implement many more new and exciting ideas we’ve been working on, so we can have a bigger impact.
Our aim is to take The Mad Food Science Program, and everything else we’ve learnt on our tour, and make it available to families and schools right around Australia. When we launch these ideas, we’re going to need your help to share them, so together, you and us, we can Transform Children’s Health on a much bigger scale.
2 – The Mad Food Science Program Gets Results
I did a whole post on some incredible results The Mad Food Science Program was getting back in June 2016 – you can read it here. But the results just keep rolling in. This is why I do a happy dance of “I love what I do!” at least once a week.
It’s also the reason why we are continuing to push on with our mission. All of these moments I share below make my heart sing. We hope these results inspire you to be a stand for your family, to keep supporting us and even go as far as helping us continue taking this mission around Australia.
5yo Tries New Foods And Teaches His Siblings
Mel wrote: “You recently visited Mayfield West School and I just wanted to let you know the impact you have had on our 5 year old. For the last 3 years our 5 year old has been our biggest struggle when it comes to food. We have had many a meal where he refuses to even take one mouthful unless it was peanut butter, nuggets, or sausages. His range of fruit and veg was limited as well.
“Since your visit last week he has been drinking green smoothies, trying all the foods we eat and surprise surprise he has even found a lot of foods he actually likes. He is excited to try new foods and likes to find them on the rainbow. His 4 new favourite foods so far are apples, baby spinach, red capsicum and slow cooked beef. Not only do I know that he is getting the nutrition he needs from these new foods, but it is making meal time more pleasant and easier for our family. Thankyou so much for sharing your journey and your knowledge with our children in a way they can relate to.”
Brydie’s Family Eat A Rainbow and Share it At Daycare
“After hearing your talk, I grabbed one of your rainbow fruit and veggie charts which has pride of place in my kitchen. We compare our plates to our chart almost every meal and then set a challenge to add more when possible and my girls have a ball doing it (and so do I, thinking outside the box).
“We loved that chart so much we took it for show and tell to the girls daycare centre for them to share with their friends and educators. It was such a hit that all the kids got a printed black and white rainbow to colour in and then cut out fruit and veg pictures to stick on and take home! The kids loved doing it. So that’s over 30 children who participated in the activities and had a great time doing it! The next week my girls and I took in a big basket full of fresh, spray-free mandarines to share, and it was like a feeding frenzy!”
Banjo (8) and Eden (6) Had This To Say
First we received this message from a mum after her family attended one of our Family Events in Mackay. She said:
“Just got home after attending your wonderful workshop, which inspired a great conversation all the way home.”
Then I received a message from each of her kids:
“I loved it so much that was lovely xoxoxo. I learned that sugar is bad thanks xoxoxo your the best love.”
“Thanks for the lesson, I looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooved it and the smoothie, they both were awesome. Oh and did you know you’re on the news!”
Sarah Focusses On Her Kids and The School Tuckshop
“I would just like to say a huge Thankyou for creating The Root Cause and sharing your knowledge and journey. I know it has opened my eyes as a parent and also as a part of our school tuckshop program, so not only will I be focusing on creating healthier lunch boxes for my girls, but I will be a part of creating a new tuckshop menu with a Mad Food Science menu selection as well!”
School Introduces Healthy Eating Club
Danielle, a mum who arranged for The Mad Food Science Program to go to her daughters school at Proserpine sent us this email: “…One of the primary school teacher’s is going to be offering a new lunch time club this term. It’s been dubbed the Healthy Eating Club! The kids that sign up will get to put together and/or cook something healthy together once a week and of course get to eat it! I’ve been asked to help out and I’m currently raiding your website for recipes that we can do in a short time frame!”
Kids Reading Ingredients In Their Lunchbox
After we ran The Mad Food Science Program at Endeavour Christian College in Cooktown, a teacher told us how the students from Prep, Year 1 and Year 2 got the teachers to help read all the packet labels they had in their lunchbox and to work out how much sugar was in them.
School Children Designing Their Own Healthy Tuckshop Menu
Collingwood Park in Qld had their entire school of 584 students plus 150 parents participate in The Mad Food Science Program. The Deputy Principal and the School Principal are amazing and continue to undertake fun initiatives to keep healthy lunches in front of the school community. The Deputy Principal wrote to me about 3 months after we had been at the school and shared this story:
“Children applied for places on a Taste Test Panel and one child from each class was chosen. They tried new potential items for our new healthier Tuck Shop menu and completed feedback sheets . The favourite items are now being introduced to our Tuck Shop Menu. Further items for the Taste Test panel are now planned to replace the current unhealthy items.”
How innovative is that! And how much ownership do you think the students have of that Tuck Shop Menu. So So Impressed.
Lee Is Empowered and Transforms His Health
This is Lee. His beautiful mum, Bec sent me this picture of her son – a before shot and a now shot. She shared how since he did The Mad Food Science Program™ he has cut back on gluten and also the sugar he eats. He feels better, and everyone is telling him how good he looks.
His mum says he’s making much better food choices for himself. He and his mum have been an incredible stand for his health. And they have really transformed his health!
Bronwyn Inspires Friends To Improve Lunchboxes
“So I have shared my lunch box photos on my own facebook page every now and then. On the weekend I had my first ever girls weekend away and part of the trip home it was just myself and only one of my friends driving a few hours together. We got talking about food and lunch boxes and I was so proud/honoured when she told me that from me sharing my daughter’s lunch boxes it made her look at what she had been doing and made her make changes. It’s great to hear how the ripple effect can happen from just sharing. So thank you Belinda for the huge impact you have had on my own journey.”
Sebria Changes Lunchboxes, loses 12 kilos and improves her blood sugar levels
Mena Creek Makes Changes to Tuckshop and Sees Improvements in Lunchboxes
Jennifer, a teacher organised us to visit her small school in Mena Creek. She wrote: “The students’ and the parents’ workshops were great. The students have responded well and it is evident in the changes we are seeing in numerous lunch boxes. Well done! The parents have also added your smoothie recipe to the tuckshop menu as well as some snack boxes of raw veg, cheese, fruit and some crackers. We have plans to continue driving the healthy lunches message during recess times, in the newsletters and designing some specific activities that continue to reinforce the message with the students.”
New Lambton Heights Infant School Creates Real Food Challenge
Straight after The Mad Food Science Incursion, the teachers kept all the students together and created a real food challenge for recess. The idea was to see who could bring in the most colourful range of fruit and vegetables for recess.
Jett 10, Speaks to His Class
Justine’s Son Makes Himself A Green Smoothie
“Thank you for visiting my sons school St Catherines College – Proserpine!! He just made himself a very healthy smoothie he learnt yesterday!!!??”- Justine
Katie Shares Her Children Talk About Better Choices
In this short video, Katie shares what an impact The Mad Food Science Program had on her children.
Emma’s Daughter Repacks Her Lunchbox Without Sugary Yoghurt
Emma who is also a school teacher shared this short video about how her daughter repacked her lunchbox after learning how to read packet labels in the Mad Food Science Program.
Mt Kilcoy Public School Momentum
About 3 months after I visited a beautiful, scenic small school at Mt Kilcoy in Qld, I received an incredible email from Erin, the parent who arranged for us to bring our Australian Tour to the school. She wanted to share the momentum the school has had since we were at the school. They have trialled having green smoothies at the canteen alongside baked goods and the green smoothies sold out! Even outside of school the children, at birthday parties, the children are making better choices:
“I had one mum telling me about listening in to the conversation of a group of eight year olds at her house during a birthday party, where they were discussing what foods were good for their bodies.” There was loads more, to see what else Erin had to say, check out this post on Facebook.
Being of Service
One of our personal goals is to be of service to those who support our mission to Transform Children’s Health In Australia. Each week I try to write a free educational blog post and create a free recipe. The education blog is usually inspired from questions I get asked at my workshops. The recipe tends to be whatever I feel like creating, and this is often dictated by what I have in my pantry and fridge. Some weeks I have what the kids very diplomatically call Epic Fails. Sometimes I like to post these just so everyone realises sometimes we all have fails. Most weeks I do tend to have wins, though. For your convenience, here are the top 5 most popular blog posts and recipes.
Top 5 Most Popular Educational Blog Posts
- Breakfast cereal is my downfall
- 10 Non Sandwich Lunchbox Ideas
- Snacks are my failing
- What a 10yo boy learnt about his lunchbox
- Before you put that packet in the lunchbox
And I am pretty proud to share this one Indrani wrote – it’s called 5 Things Mum Should Have Tattooed On Her.
Top 5 Most Popular Recipes
I try each week to create and post a free recipe. Here’s the top 5 most popular recipes.
- Chocolate Protein Bombs
- Chewy Caramel Rice Bar
- No Bake Freezer Muesli Slice
- Cheats Gozleme
- Super Simple Lunchbox Pikelets
Raising Awareness
Kaley, Our Big Green Bus
The whole idea of Kaley, our big green bus, is that she’s a mobile billboard for our mission. Everywhere we stop, people ask us “What it’s all about?” and well, you know us, we love a chat. That’s when we tell them all about the state of children’s health in Australia. We share our dream of kids being empowered to make better food choices, and to work with their parents to make those choices – without the usual parent child power struggle.
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times we’ve shared what’s happening in children’s health, but suffice to say, it happens at least once in every town we stop. Sometimes it’s a lot more than once. And you should hear some of the conversations that follow. People share freely about their thoughts, their grandkids, their own kids. It’s amazing!
We also use Kaley as a giant prop when we do our pop up community events, and she features heavily in our media too. This may sound a little sick, but we really are all quite in love with her. Home Sweet Kaley!
In The Media
Raising awareness in the media is an important objective of our Australian Tour too. We really need to spread the message far and wide about what’s happening to Children’s Health in Australia. We need people to start to realise what has happened to our food supply and the impact it’s having on our health.
To see how we’ve been raising awareness in the Media, visit our media page here. This is an example of just some of the media we’ve done to raise awareness.
On Social Media
Our audience largely visit Facebook, then Instagram. We like to be active at least once a day and share information that’s of value. Most times it’s around children’s health, blog posts around health, and recipes. We had one post go viral on Facebook about how a 9yo boy became empowered to read packet labels and decided he no longer wanted to have a popular apple fruit drink – it reached over 3 million people!
We do like to share a little of our personality too, so sometimes it’s funny parenting meme’s- this one has been one of our most popular shares.
or this one… actually this one makes me laugh so much I snort. I hope you find it as funny as me:
Beyond 2017
We have learnt so much over the past 2 years. We have spoken to thousands of parents, hundreds of teachers and thousands and thousands of kids not to mention by the end of this year, visited around 90 schools. We have collected questions and issues being faced by all these groups.
Quite honestly, we now have so much demand for our Mad Food Science Program that we could literally keep on travelling and doing our in-person incursions. Whilst I absolutely love this, if we are to have a bigger impact on the issue of children’s health, we must stop our tour and put into place initiatives which can have an impact on a much bigger scale.
Israel and I have so many ideas on what we can do to have a bigger impact. In fact so many ideas, that we have really had to pull it back to just 3 so we can focus. We’re still in the early stages of 2 of these but we have already started on the third –The Real Food Lunchbox Project. This project is currently underway and we’re studying what happens when a whole school, for a whole term eats replaces processed packaged food with real food of fruits, vegetables, dips and smoothies. The project is already getting incredible results (see below). It’s early days but we’re collecting data on concentration, focus, behaviour, detention rates, handwriting, rubbish and how kids attitudes towards fruits and vegetables at home changes.
Stick with us beyond 2017 and help us in our mission to Transform Children’s Health. Your support is so very much appreciated.
Thanks To Our National Partners
Lastly, it would be remiss of me to wrap-up without saying a huge thank you to all of you for supporting us.
Also an enormous thank you to the best National Partners we could ever hope for.
Worldwide Printing Solutions who ensure every student who participates in The Mad Food Science Program™ gets a handout to take home to their parents. This handout is a vital part of the program because it helps keep the conversation about better food choices happening at home. Here’s a classic example:
“Thank you for the great work you are doing. My kids decorated my pantry door after attending last Sunday’s session. They got so much out of it.”
After our tour visits a school, it’s quite common for us to be asked to help with improving their canteen. Unfortunately, we just do not have the capacity to do this. We really didn’t like not being able to help schools in this regard and so we started to seek out people who could help. We discovered My School Connect. What we loved about My School Connect is they not only help with transitioning school tuckshops to healthier menu plans, they also provide software platforms which help P&C parents and schools in other ways too. My School Connect have software which helps with:
- events
- fundraisers
- uniform shop
- tuckshop
This year My School Connect also launched a National Healthy Tuckshop Day initiative. Healthy Tuckshop Day encouraged schools right around Australia to sign a pledge committing to transitioning their tuckshop to offer healthy menu options. You don’t need to wait to 2018’s Healthy Tuckshop Day, you get can get started by joining The Tuckshop Revolution here.
Oh how we love our big green bus Kaley. She has now been right around Australia and her beautiful signage is still intact (except one which had close encounter with a fence) because of the wonderful work done by Scott from Scott Sign.