A CATERING CIC based in Winchester has been offering community cooking classes to help vulnerable people learn how to prepare food.

Munch CIC has managed to provide more than 500 places at its workshops in 2022 alone, helping to teach children and vulnerable how to cook from scratch in the kitchen.

Founder Denzil Carlton explained the workshops, saying: “It’s working with a variety of social community groups, picking up the foundations from them, or referrals because when we do stuff in schools, the schools will know which families are struggling a little bit.

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“So, they can come along to this, they learn to cook some food, everyone’s happy.”

Community projects and groups the CIC has worked alongside include Connect for Communities, Communities against Cancer, Friends of the Family, and Integr8 Dance.

Denzil continued: “It’s great as the whole family makes food together.

“So, for the little kids, one they are getting their hands dirty which is always important, and two instead of just seeing food go into a basket in the shop and then going on a plate, they are seeing the process involved.

“And because they’ve got their hands dirty it makes it more of a binding commitment to them.

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“For instance, today with teenagers in Romsey, and there’s one in Andover later in the week as well, obviously they are older so we can give them more in-depth recipes.

“And if we can teach a teenager to have one, tentpole recipe, if they’ve got one thing they can make well and they can make it to kitchen standard, they can go ‘I know how to make a tagliatelle, I know how to make a passata, I know how to make all these different things’, then that will mean they are more comfortable in the kitchen, they will be more inclined to make food themselves long term than getting it from the shops.”

The community interest company was started by Denzil and his wife, nutritionist Mary Needham, in May 2021 and offers event catering alongside the workshops as a way to bring in funding.

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Denzil said that the cost-of-living crisis has impacted Munch as a business, saying: “From the perspective as a catering company, your staff are now 100 per cent more expensive, your ingredients are between 15 and 350 per cent more expensive, your rental rate and fees have all doubled.

“So from the perspective of a catering company it’s quite challenging; from the perspective of dealing with the people that we deal with, they’ve got more pressing concerns, realistically.”

Despite this, Denzil said that he and Mary are “realistically optimistic” that they will be able to continue delivering workshops and catering events well into 2023.

More information about the workshops and the CIC can be found by visiting munchcic.co.uk.