“…90% of the local produce used by the school lunch for the student’s meals usually goes to waste, and we want that to change,” says School Lunch Nutrition Education Training Program Manager, Sapioamoa Galea’i, who is bringing down well known New Zealand chef and award-winning author Robert Oliver to conduct training for the cooks. The plan is to teach them innovative and creative ways to cook local produce so the students will consume it.

Responding to Samoa News questions, Ms Galea’i said when SODEXO took over the program, they had a healthy menu with the introduction of brown rice and other greens. However when the School Lunch took over from Sodexo the cooks’ mentality changed “to the old ways” and “we are on a mission to change that mentality.”

She told Samoa News, “The cooks have to think: healthy food, leads to healthy students.”

SODEXO is the U.S. based firm that was managing the school lunch program for a couple of years, however DOE did not renew the contract with SODEXO but opted to handle the school lunch program “in-house”.

Galea’i said Oliver will be in the territory for one week this month, and will be conducting training for the head cooks first. He will then hold other training for all of DOE’s cooks, which number more than 250.

She explained that training is always handy in any job and especially cooking which is a daily necessity, so providing the cooks with the best trainer that can go along with the healthy  trends is a must. The program manager said 90% of the local produce used by the school lunch for the student’s meals usually goes to waste — “and we want to change that.”

“As a nutritionist, there are two things that come to mind:  one, is that the person does not like the food, secondly it’s not cooked properly.

“I cannot change what the person likes or doesn’t like, but what I can do to help the situation is bring down a cook that can train more innovative ways to cook the local produce so the students will eat it and not let it go to waste,” Galea’i said.

She said they are on a mission to build up their head cooks to be managers who can run their own kitchens and train their own cooks.

Galea’i told Samoa News that Oliver is a New Zealand chef who was raised in Fiji and Samoa, who has developed restaurants in New York, Miami, Las Vegas and Sydney, "farm to table" resorts in the Caribbean and food programs feeding homeless people and African immigrants with AIDS in New York City.

According to Oliver’s Facebook page, he returned to the South Pacific to write his first book, Me’a Kai: The Food and Flavours of the South Pacific (Random House, New Zealand), with Dr. Tracy Berno and Fiji photographer Shiri Ram.

“Written with a development mission to connect Pacific agriculture to the region’s tourism sector, Me’a Kai stunned the food world by winning top prize, ‘Best Cookbook in the World 2010’, at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Paris, considered to be the Pulitzers of cookbooks, beating the books from NOMA and The New York Times.”

In 2013, Robert released “Mea’ai Samoa: Recipes and Stories from the Heart of Polynesia” (Random House). In May 2014, this book won the “Best TV Chef Cookbook in the World 2013” at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Beijing.

Oliver is the Chef Ambassador for Le Cordon Bleu, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands and is the presenter of REAL PASIFIK, a television series based on the food culture of the South Pacific.

He was a keynote speaker at TEDx Auckland in 2013 and was one of the authors chosen to represent New Zealand at the Frankfurt Bookfair in 2012. Between 2011 & 2012, he was  Consulting Chef for NZ Trade & Enterprise (NZTE) in China (based in Shanghai).

Oliver has also done volunteer work for God’s Love We Deliver, New York City — which provides essential food and nutrition services to men, women and children living with HIV/AIDS, cancer, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease and other serious illnesses.