Power to the Young People!

Last night I conducted a cooking club session with around 12 eighth graders during which we made healthy crepes. I saw students engaged and interested in learning more and more about cooking. I, along with the teachers I've got helping, will be challenging the students to try their hands at intricate recipes. The ultimate goal for me is to put students into positions of leadership both advocating health and also working with their hands to create a delicious product. Uniting those two factors will create a pressurized educational environment teaching lessons of both nutrition and pride in leadership.

The greatest addition to such a program would be improvisation. Leading the students through recipe after recipe with the intention of creating a genuine circumstance of improvisation and food would allow for a lot of growth. So, how do you implement such an event? Assuming that teaching basic kitchen skills like recipe reading and measuring, along with safety skills, puts anyone in a position to experiment in the kitchen. It follows that with 4 or 5 lessons done with the same young people, they will feel comfortable using the tools and making basic foods. With such comfort instilled, the instructor provides a "mysterious" bag of ingredients and the students will have to develop a recipe on the spot without prior notice or extensive supervision. More than just improvisation and leadership skill building, an event like this could teach the use of seemingly disconnected foods into an incorporated recipe. such an experience would hopefully teach students how to take random ingredients in their home kitchens and work them into a healthy, delicious meal.

Leadership skill building is integral to a person's development as a critical thinker and actor. The lack of such skills is one reason students can sit through a nutrition class and not relate the curricular work to their lives or their communities life at all. Period. What I hope for are students who think about nutrition through the lens of a community activist working to empower others. I want students to be asking their friends and family: do people understand how this work connects to our community? or What are we doing to build community here? With sincere reflection on those kinds of questions comes critical mental and emotional health. I hope this addition to my regular classes in the schools will reinforce the belief in young people power.