Imagine you’re standing in the middle of the grocery store, awash in shelves of product, overwhelmed by the prospect of assembling a nutritious meal. Now also imagine you’re on a strict budget.
Cooking Matters can help.
Over twenty-five years ago, this national healthy food–focused cooking program was formed to help address childhood hunger across the United States. Organizers pair seasoned cooks with nutrition professionals to co-teach six-week-long cooking courses in schools, childcare centers, church kitchens, elderly housing buildings, hospital facilities, and food pantries. These classes can be held wherever there is a need.
Courtney Kennedy, nutrition and education manager for Cooking Matters Maine, based out of the Good Shepherd Food Bank offices, explains that participants delve into the art of cooking for beginners and learn how the foods they are preparing can help make their lives healthier. Teachers guide attendees on how to plan and prep nutritious and affordable meals for themselves and their families.
Facilitated by many local sponsors (including Hannaford, which donates the food for all Cooking Matters Maine classes and provides enough for each participant to prepare the same dish at home for their family), Cooking Matters Maine classes have reached 37,000 Mainers thus far.
One in four Maine children suffer from food insecurity, which means they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. A new law requiring Maine public schools to provide free meals to all students should help the problem. Cooking Matters classes dovetail nicely with universal school lunch because they teach children that cooking at home is part and parcel of a healthy lifestyle.
Kennedy is quick to point out, though, that Cooking Matters classes are not just for kids. She taught a course at a veterans clinic recently and worked with a gentleman who’d joined the class to learn how to cook healthy meals for himself. Using the nutrition and culinary tools Kennedy taught him, he shed the weight his doctor required him to lose to become eligible for knee surgery.
The Cooking Matters curriculum, says Kennedy, can be adapted to meet the special needs of the individuals within each class. To request a Cooking Matters class in your community, or to volunteer as a cook or nutrition professional, contact Kennedy at CKennedy@GSFB.org.
