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A Culinary Cooks Corp
By Ann Cooper —
Last week I had the honor of speaking at Johnson & Wales University and addressing a group of over 150 students, staff and administrators. I was extremely impressed by the program in general, but I became enamored by their dual major program combining Culinary Arts and Nutrition. I believe that this four year program, and hopefully others of its kind, will help change the way we’re feeding children in our country.
In my work as a school lunch advocate, I find that one of the greatest areas of need is training nutrition services workers — many of whom have spent years serving frozen processed food — to cook real food. From an administrative standpoint, finding trained chefs and cooks who truly understand nutrition and are able to follow the USDA guidelines can seem like an insurmountable task. To have a cadre of chefs and cooks that are skilled in both culinary arts and nutrition would help schools all across the country feed our children delicious and nutritious food.
I believe that we need to institute a Culinary Cooks Corp that mirrors the ideals of Volunteers for America and Vista Volunteers. The idea would be to allow students graduating from culinary programs such as the one at Johnson & Wales, to work off their student loans by dedicating a year or more to working in schools feeding children. This type of a program would have a plethora of benefits.
For the students, they would experience volume cooking, interact with students (extremely discerning and vocal guests), work in a fairly rigid management structure, work within extremely constrained budgets and learn firsthand about giving back.
For schools, such a program would provide skilled cooks who are also trained in nutrition. These cooks could help educate the school’s food service team, as well as parents and students. And their expertise, paid at a much reduced rate, would allow the schools to grow their institutional knowledge.
There are over 100,000 schools in America feeding over 30 million children lunch each day under almost unimaginable financial, facility and human resources constraints. Perhaps this type of program can help to turn back the tipping point of the scales as the tsunami of the obesity crisis threatens to engulf America’s children.
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