Food as Medicine: A Pilot Nutrition and Cooking Curriculum for Children of Participants in a Community-Based Culinary Me
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FROM THE FIELD
Food as Medicine: A Pilot Nutrition and Cooking Curriculum for Children of Participants in a Community‑Based Culinary Medicine Class Haley Marshall1 · Jaclyn Albin2 Accepted: 5 November 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Purpose Healthy dietary change proves challenging for all families navigating the variable food preferences of children but can be especially burdensome for low-income families with limited resources. Encouragingly, programs that engage children in hands-on nutrition education appear to promote changes that positively impact the entire family. From these observations, we designed a dedicated pediatric cooking and nutrition class concurrent with a community-based culinary medicine class for adult clients of a food pantry. Description Through the Food As Medicine (FAME) nutrition education initiative at community pantry sites, we launched culinary medicine classes for pantry clients and offered concurrent culinary medicine classes for their children. Each pediatric class included an interactive lesson, hands-on cooking, and crafts or games to reinforce concepts prior to sharing a meal with parents. Assessment The pilot classes launched at two pantry sites, and the team leading the pediatric classes solicited feedback from participants and stakeholders to enable thematic analysis of the impact. Observations included the ability of children to identify new foods and to report enthusiasm for assisting with food preparation at home. Child participants engaged in the class demonstrated willingness to try new foods when joining their parents for a meal. Conclusion This pilot intervention details an educational, hands-on nutrition and cooking curriculum for children of lowincome families. Through age-appropriate experiential learning, we observed a positive impact of this class in its ability to encourage family participation, to augment nutrition lessons taught to parent participants, and to empower young learners to advocate for healthy dietary change. Keywords Culinary medicine · Nutrition education · Low-income families · Community classes · Food pantries · Cooking curriculum · Dietary change · Food security
Significance Statement Promoting and empowering dietary change for low-income families facing food insecurity is very challenging and difficult for most families to sustain. Implementation of * Jaclyn Albin [email protected] Haley Marshall [email protected] 1
University of Kentucky School of Medicine, 800 Rose Street, Lexington, KY 10140536, USA
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, 5323 Harry Hines Blvd, Dallas, TX 75390, USA
2
community culinary medicine classes with concurrent, ageappropriate pediatric curriculum for existing food pantry clients shows promise as an innovative approach to support better nutrition for the entire family by eliminating some of the barriers to knowledge acquisition, access to resources, and the common challenge of pediatric resistance to new foods.
Purpose Nutriti
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