Monday is our favourite day of the week because we go to "Cooking My Favourite Things", our after school programme. When it first started we made cakes and decorated them. We also made pizza, doughnuts, cup cakes, pancakes and smoothies just to name a few dishes. We like cooking mainly because we get to take the items home. But Jiquena also does it because her mom told her to. Every item we made came with the task of washing dishes, which none of us like, but cooking and eating was always fun.

And then the time for the annual Agricultural Exhibition came. We were all excited. We sent in our entries. As the time got closer, we got really anxious, knowing that everyone would see our foods. Then the day for preparation came; we worked and worked and worked, but as usual, hard work pays off. We all got ribbons – blue, red, yellow and green.

There is never a dull moment at Clearwater Middle School. We started to attend this school in the 400th year of Bermuda's settlement, and since we are students who study Food and Nutrition our teacher decided that we should find out what foods were eaten in the 17th century, especially on the (ship) Patience, since our school was building a model.

We found that the meals on the Sea Venture and Patience included salted beef, pork, and fish. The salt was the preservative that kept the meat from going bad, thus improving its shelf life. Hardtack (a hard, dry biscuit), dried peas, and beans were also used on the ship.

These foods were non-perishable, meaning that they did not spoil easily, except if they were kept for very long periods, weevils would infest them and all flour products on the ship.

Life on the boat must have been hard for those people because if the weather was bad they could not start a fire so their foods had to be eaten cold and raw. After a while the biscuits got very hard to eat, the cheese got mouldy, the butter turned rancid and even the beer began to go sour by the end of the voyage.

Citrus fruits such as lime and lemons were used to prevent scurvy (a vitamin C deficiency). Even their water supply went bad from microscopic growth in them. They also carried rum on the ship. This helped to make the water drinkable for longer periods and also make the crew happy.

We hope to prepare a few dishes using foods from the 17th century meals for a display sometime in the near future.