Mac Community comes together to bake pies
by Kathy MacLean
Over the summer a group of Mac staff members got together to kick around ideas for an activity that would bring the Macdonald community together at the start of the school year and would tie to Macdonald’s motto “Mastery for Service.” Once the seed was planted, it didn’t take long for the theme to emerge - #MacShares. The first #MacShares event – Apple Pies – was held on Monday, September 25th. The 80 available spots for the event were filled in a matter of days.
Says event organizer Maureen Rose, “we realized we have all of the components to pull it off. The School of Human Nutrition has strong relationships with Montreal area community organizations that provide food and nutrition programming; the Campus has an incredible market garden full of fruits and vegetables, and we have access to the Food and Nutrition Lab -  a commercial-scale kitchen and demonstration classroom. Best of all, we have a group of very dedicated volunteers who want to build bridges in the community – as well as students, staff and faculty members who strive to make the world a better place.”
Adds Rose, “there was a nice mix of undergraduate and graduate students as well as faculty members and staff at the event and they represented most units on campus.”
The hundreds of pies baked on this day were donated to Amcal Family Services, Corbeil de Pain/Bread Basket Lac-St-Louis, Share the Warmth and the NDG Food Bank – to help the organizations fill their freezers in time for Thanksgiving.
Première Moisson graciously donated the pie pastry and the Tablée des Chefs, who are running a kitchen skills program for youth out of the Food and Nutrition labs this semester, dedicated a day of their program to make the pies that were served with ice-cream to the participants at the end of the event. The Mac Farm provided the McIntosh apples; Anja Geitmann, Dean of the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, generously provided the seed money to get the project off the ground. Much of the preparation for the day’s event was carried out by Claudia Cheng and Henry Chen, both in their second year of the MSc Applied (Human Nutrition) Dietetics Credentialing program.
Thanks to the many volunteers who stepped up to make this event a huge success. We hope that this will be the first of many #MacShares events.
What participants had to say...
“Great fun! Best part of my day!” - staff member
“I loved everything”
“It was fun! Great way to get people together, working for a great group of causes” - staff member
“I enjoyed working in the food lab, meeting students and others from Mac. Eating apple pie, too” - staff member
“I like the community building and sharing” - student
“I loved the team spirit” - staff
“I liked meeting some of the faculty” - community organization
“I enjoyed the “community” gathering and sharing and being able to personally say thanks” - AMCAL (one of the community groups receiving pies)
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