Peekskill High School Holds 12th Annual Food Festival to Celebrate National Foreign Language Week

Peekskill High School Holds 12th Annual Food Festival to Celebrate National Foreign Language Week
As part of their National Foreign Language Week celebrations, Peekskill High School held their 12th Annual Food Festival on Thursday, March 9.

Students began prepping for the week-long celebrations a week prior to the event, decorating the school’s hallways and planning meals for Thursday’s feast.

“We want the students to take pride in culture, not just their own, but various cultures,” said Foreign Language teacher Carolyne Hall, who helped organize the week of events.

Hall noted that her students look forward to the Foreign Language Week celebrations from the beginning of the school year.

“What’s really neat about this event is that at the beginning of each year, the students always want to know when they get to decorate the halls, watch the movies, do the dancing and have the food festival,” Hall said. “It shows we’re really making an impact on these kids.”

The multi-cultural feast included dishes from locations such as Jamaica, China, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Puerto Rico, Spain, Italy and Taiwan, just to name a few. Many of the recipes contained ingredients that some students were trying for the first time, such as oxtail, cuy (guinea pig) and sweet beans.

Hall also noted that while the food festival is an in-school celebration, much of the preparatory work that goes into the dishes is done at home with family members for many of the students cooking for the event.

“The food festival ends up being a family activity for a lot of our students,” Hall said. “They learn to cook the traditional meals their parents made and usually hear a story or two about where the recipe came from.”

Click here for a photo album from this event.