culinary class

by Matt DeNoto

In celebration of Earth Day recently, some university cafeterias made a small but significant change designed to raise awareness of what may be one of the biggest contributors to climate change. They cut out beef and cheese for Earth Day.

The industrial processes that go into large scale cattle and dairy farming result in a large amount of methane being produced. Then there is the pollution generated by the shipping of the products.

On top of that, Americans just eat too much beef in general. It raises the danger of heart disease and diabetes. So anything to encourage people to eat less beef is generally a good thing.

I remember taking ‘Health’ classes in school growing up. But they weren’t full year classes like math or science. They were half year classes. So for the first half of the year we’d have Health and the second half of the year would be something like shop class. And we wouldn’t even take it every year. We’d have half a year of Health, every other year. If memory serves.

Looking back, it seems silly to me how little attention health got in school. Health classes, physical education and home economics (the only class where students sometimes cooked) have all become easy targets for schools look ing to trim their budgets.

But what good is all the history knowledge in the world, if you’re not able to adequately care for your body?

My girlfriend is an amazing cook. It’s an interest she picked up from her father. Unfortunately for me, neither of my parents were much interested in cooking. In my home, cooking was a chore. I imagine it was that way in lots of homes.

Why aren’t schools picking up the slack? After all, feeding oneself is a lifelong responsibility. I don’t know that it will ever matter that I read ‘The Catcher In The Rye,’ but there are definitely times I feel helpless in the grocery store as I try to think of uses for the aisles and aisles of unfamiliar ingredients, only to find myself reaching for the old standards I’ve been making since I began living on my own.

The very concept of the ‘Freshman Fifteen,’ the number of pounds the average student allegedly gains in his/her first year of college, should be a wake up call that we are not doing enough to educate and train kids to feed themselves properly.

As my girlfriend has (slowly) taught me, food can be an incredibly creative and rewarding outlet. And since you need to eat everyday, why not encourage kids to see it as fun?

Typically, kids at school are served mass produced, generally low quality, unhealthy lunches like meatloaf and pizza. If we instead provided kids with the information and tools to make20their own lunches, we’d probably quickly see them fostering healthy habits that will last even after they’ve left school.

(Full Disclosure / Shameless Plug: My girlfriend is a recipe developer / writer for Hungry Girl.)

** edit note: all images are of vegan foods… showing that it doesn’t have to be full of meat and cheese to be tempting