nosh nook #136 - monday, september 21, 2009

cooking teacher whips up kids' interest in food (link)
09.21.09 - sf chronicle - by edward guthmann

last month, the nosh nook took a look at a ny times article about the creative cooks culinary center, a program here in brooklyn that teaches kids about food & cooking & whatnot. as i mentioned, kids are absolutely horrible at keeping a balanced diet. if left to their own devices, those little twirps would end up on the paul rudnick diet. luckily, there are peeps out there who have enough patience to teach twirps about how to eat healthy & luckily, those peeps aren't confined to some hippie commune in the berkshires. they've got tons of liberal hippies out on the west coast too!

there's one such hippie at the thousand oaks elementary school out in berkeley, ca, where michael bauce "teaches basic cooking and nutrition to 438 students." as the chronicle reports, twenty years ago, bauce's wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, so they began eating macrobiotically & she lived for another ten years partly thanks to the diet. during that time, they also started a "macrobiotic meal-delivery service out of (their) home." shortly after she passed, the woman who started the thousand oaks food education program reached out to him & the rest is history. he's been teaching kids how to make "three sisters stew" and "sautéed broccoli & cauliflower" ever since.

it appears that bauce runs a tight ship in his classes. with each class, once he's told "them about the harvest of the month," they wash their hands, put on aprons, mix the food, wash their cutting boards, set the table & sit down quietly. "everyone has to be quiet. no one eats until we say the magic words, 'bon appetit, let's eat.'" it doesn't say so in the article, but i can only assume that if you're a rambunctious eight-year old who can't sit there quietly, you don't get any tomato salsa. you'll probably have to take off the apron too. he also has a rule called the "three bite rule," where "if someone doesn't like the sound of something, they have to try three bites." this is similar to the "no thank you helping," a concept developed by my mom's mom & in my case, pretty much exclusively applied to butternut squash. anyway, it's a tight ship...a tight, hippie ship. say that ten times fast.