Peterson Garden Project and you are coming together for a great way to teach kids about food while having fun!
We’re partnering with the University of Illinois Extension with Kids in the Kitchen, part of a nationwide program to encourage young people ages 8 to 14 to eat healthier meals and snacks through hands-on cooking experiences. Youth participants learn to prepare simple, healthy foods they can make themselves.
Classes are held at the Community Cooking School, a fully-equipped teaching kitchen with a mission of teaching everyone (Everyone. Seriously.) how to cook their own food.
Every lesson includes:
* An Easy to Prepare Recipe
* Kitchen and Food Safety Information
* A Healthy Eating Topic
* Physical Activity
By the end of each series, every kid in the class will be cooking up a storm!
This September, Peterson Garden Project will start lessons for kids about basic cooking skills, good nutrition, healthy food choices, staying safe in the kitchen, and how cooking and gardening go hand in hand! You can help us get going by making a pledge for the first 3 sessions in fall and winter 2015-16.
We’re starting out in weeks one and two at our beautiful community table, getting to know each other, and preparing and eating some delicious meals that the kids can also prepare at home with parents, siblings and friends.
In the third week, kids will be at fully equipped learning stations, just like the grown-ups, because volunteers from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois are building us some awesome benches for the kids to stand on!
Get some kids in the kitchen today by making a pledge.
In the building that houses the Peterson Garden Project Community Cooking School, there are two vending machines. One of them is full of candy and chips; the other one has what the snack food industry likes to call “healthy snacks”– things like granola bars, and sun chips, and those “reel froot jelly” things that kids insist isn’t candy. We refuse to call it “healthy” food, so we just say that one of the machines has “junk food” and the other one has “snack food.”
A fine distinction.
In fact the distinction should not be “healthy” or “snack” or “junk” but simply there is food and then there is that edible stuff that they sell in all the pretty boxes. If you have to say “this is healthy food” chances are it isn’t food at all because saying “healthy” food is like saying “cold” ice or “metal” steel– it’s simply redundant.
Kids in the Kitchen brings this back home to kids—they learn about real food–how it starts at delicious and how they can make it themselves. Healthy barely needs to be stated.
Food is healthy.
That is its purpose.
You should make a pledge:
• If you think kids should know their way around a kitchen
• If you learned to how to cook as a kid
• If you’re sorry that you didn’t learn to cook as a kid
Help us out. Get some kids in our kitchen this fall.