Peterson Garden Project Kids in the Kitchen

The kids are back in school, and about to start up in the kitchen at the Peterson Garden Project Community Cooking School.

We're working with a community partner for 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

With your help, by the end of each series, every kid in the class will be cooking up a storm!

(Don't forget to check the Updates tab to see how the project is going!

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.

Everybody loves Cheetos. And no harm to it. Sometimes it’s just what you need.

But kids need to know that apples are delicious too, and even that you can actually make things like Cheetos yourself. In fact, one of our most popular programs for kids shows them how to make their own soda and Doritos.

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 Doritos; 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 get stuff from there, too. But it isn’t what we’d call healthy—it’s "junk food" or "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.