The Role of Nutrition in City Schools

            Baltimore City Schools are making progress to prioritize nutrition in education. Great Kids Farms, the Baltimore City Schools farm, provided our school with materials to jump-start our garden, including seedlings, compositing supplies, and education materials for experiential learning. We also received a salad bar for the cafeteria as a reward for submitting proper FARMS paperwork; better yet, students are actually eating at it. Just taking a quick stroll around the cafeteria, I can see the improvement from last year in the nutritional value of the food on students’ plates, which sometimes comes straight from our own garden.

            Despite the positive change, this progress ends once students walk out the school doors. I see throngs of students stopping at McDonalds on the way to the bus stop, or picking up a party size bag of hot Cheetos while walking home. In a homeroom activity earlier in the year involving food logs, over half the students reported having one or more fried foods for dinner, despite acknowledging them as unhealthy. Although these eating habits lead to a long list of negative effects, including obesity and diabetes, I discovered an overwhelmingly simple cause when I asked students why they eat these unhealthy foods.

“I don’t know how to cook.”

            So, the next step to ensuring students have access to three healthy meals a day: teach them how to cook. The Teen Battle Chef program is an after school club that teaches students nutrition, food safety, cultural background of foods, and, of course, cooking skills. Teen Battle Chef uses a similar layout to competitive cooking shows such as Iron Chef by giving students recipes which they have to prepare for the entire group and complete a presentation for all, including the judges. Now in our fourth week of the program, the shift in attitudes toward healthy foods and cooking is impressive. Fifteen students went from thinking all peppers are spicy to chopping and snacking on bell peppers and hummus. A solitary student had tried mussels and attested to that “they taste as bad as they smell;” by the end of the class there were no leftovers. Although it is only one program at one school with only a small subset of kids, I can see fundamental changes in perceptions of healthy foods. Hopefully, students will spread their knowledge to family and friends, and programs like Teen Battle Chef will continue to not only give students healthy meals, but lifelong healthy eating habits.

For more information on the Teen Battle Chef program, check out the website: http://www.familycookproductions.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=42&Itemid=45