Comments on: Tom Philpott & The Grist on School Lunch http://www.chefann.com/blog/archives/1095 Chef Ann Cooper is a renegade lunch lady who works to transform cafeterias into culinary classrooms for students - one school lunch at a time. She brings you information to learn about the importance of changing the way America feeds its children. Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:37:13 +0000 hourly 1 By: Changing the Face of School Lunches – There's Still a Lot of Work to Do | Agriculture Society http://www.chefann.com/blog/archives/1095/comment-page-1#comment-216740 Changing the Face of School Lunches – There's Still a Lot of Work to Do | Agriculture Society Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:45:18 +0000 http://www.chefann.com/blog/?p=1095#comment-216740 [...] more information on school lunch news, visit Chef Ann Cooper’s site, The Sustainable Table, and Two Angry [...] [...] more information on school lunch news, visit Chef Ann Cooper’s site, The Sustainable Table, and Two Angry [...]

]]> By: Kathy http://www.chefann.com/blog/archives/1095/comment-page-1#comment-216050 Kathy Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:20:36 +0000 http://www.chefann.com/blog/?p=1095#comment-216050 When I was in junior high (late 1980s) our school district still offered "home ec" as an elective - as 7th & 8th graders we had no elective classes we could choose but rather one hour of a rotating "sampler" class - every 10 weeks we rotated through the classes that included shop, drafting, foreign languages and COOKING. So essentially cooking was a required course for every junior high student in the district. We learned our way around a kitchen - how to operate the appliances and use regular kitchen equipment like you would find at home, how to clean up our messes, basic nutrition and how to plan a meal that would be both good for you and look nice (i remember learning that your plate should be colorful not monochromatic!) If you liked it you could choose to take a whole semester more as a 9th grader. Which many of us did. There we learned a lot more useful things, like what vitamins and nutrients are in different foods, how to bake from scratch and what purpose does the egg or it's parts serve in a recipe, kind of like the 80s version of watching Alton Brown. We also learned how to read a label on a packaged food. I suppose these days Home Ec teachers are pretty hard to find (ours also taught sewing!) although I do know that my old school still offers a vocational-level culinary program. That's great but I still think that if every student took cooking, even if only for 10 weeks, that would be as good an investment as pumping more money into the school lunch program. You don't have to teach them anything fussy or frufru. Just the basics...and probably the consequences of eating a diet of all processed food and takeout. Giving kids some basic knowledge and hand-on experience with real food and how to prepare it is something that will stick with most kids for the rest of their lives. When I was in junior high (late 1980s) our school district still offered “home ec” as an elective – as 7th & 8th graders we had no elective classes we could choose but rather one hour of a rotating “sampler” class – every 10 weeks we rotated through the classes that included shop, drafting, foreign languages and COOKING. So essentially cooking was a required course for every junior high student in the district. We learned our way around a kitchen – how to operate the appliances and use regular kitchen equipment like you would find at home, how to clean up our messes, basic nutrition and how to plan a meal that would be both good for you and look nice (i remember learning that your plate should be colorful not monochromatic!) If you liked it you could choose to take a whole semester more as a 9th grader. Which many of us did. There we learned a lot more useful things, like what vitamins and nutrients are in different foods, how to bake from scratch and what purpose does the egg or it’s parts serve in a recipe, kind of like the 80s version of watching Alton Brown. We also learned how to read a label on a packaged food.

I suppose these days Home Ec teachers are pretty hard to find (ours also taught sewing!) although I do know that my old school still offers a vocational-level culinary program. That’s great but I still think that if every student took cooking, even if only for 10 weeks, that would be as good an investment as pumping more money into the school lunch program. You don’t have to teach them anything fussy or frufru. Just the basics…and probably the consequences of eating a diet of all processed food and takeout. Giving kids some basic knowledge and hand-on experience with real food and how to prepare it is something that will stick with most kids for the rest of their lives.

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