Posts Tagged: kitchen

2023 Webinars Announced

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Teaching Kitchen course helps improve college students’ food security

Cooperative Extension researcher: Nutrition course a boon for UC Berkeley students

College students across the nation are struggling to meet their basic food needs. Within the University of California system of 280,000 students, 38% of undergraduate students and 20% of graduate students report food insecurity.

As part of the UC Global Food Initiative, in 2015 the Nutrition Policy Institute (a UC Agriculture and Natural Resources statewide research center) identified student food insecurity as a UC systemwide problem, prompting the UC Regents and campuses to collectively address the issue.

All 10 UC campuses now have on-site basic needs centers, providing food, emergency housing and support services. The UC system and campus working groups recognize that meeting basic needs, such as food, is a multidimensional challenge.

In response to the 2022 White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, which called for national efforts to reduce diet-related disease and food insecurity, UC renewed their commitment to cut the proportion of students facing food insecurity in half by 2030. Campuses will partner with local counties to maximize enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (also known as CalFresh in California), provide food for students who do not qualify for CalFresh, and allocate campus food resources to historically underserved student populations.

NPI's collaborative researchers continue to monitor the impact of these efforts, in addition to other interventions, such as supporting students in building basic culinary skills, to improve food security. One multipronged approach to address food insecurity at UC Berkeley is a 14-week course on Personal Food Security and Wellness with a Teaching Kitchen laboratory component.

Sarah Minkow, who teaches the Personal Food Security and Wellness course at UC Berkeley, shared that students learn about nutrition and gain culinary skills through the Cal Teaching Kitchen.

The curriculum is designed with consideration for the time, cost and convenience of healthy eating. Discussions include food safety, calculating nutrient needs, mindful eating and reading nutrition labels. The Teaching Kitchen laboratory brings the lessons to life through knife skills, “no-cook” cooking, microwave cooking and sheet pan meals.

Minkow enthusiastically highlighted her students' “overwhelmingly positive [response to the] lecture and lab,” suggesting the benefits of an interactive learning environment to garner student engagement.

“Students often give feedback that they wish this was a required course for all UC Berkeley students,” said Minkow. She noted one barrier to reaching more students: capacity of the Teaching Kitchen space.

Susana Matias, a Cooperative Extension specialist at the UC Berkeley Department of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology and collaborative researcher with the NPI, evaluated the impact of the Personal Food Security and Wellness course at UC Berkeley.

Matias reported that increasing food literacy and culinary skills among students has shown to increase intake of fruits and vegetables, and frequency of cooking, and reduce the number of skipped meals. Her study on the impact of the 14-week nutrition course also found a significant decrease in student food insecurity.

Across the UC System, students are benefiting from their campus Teaching Kitchens, including UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA and UC Riverside. Other campuses such as UC San Diego, UC San Francisco, UC Santa Cruz and UC Santa Barbara offer basic student cooking classes as well.

Katherine Lanca, UC Global Food Initiative fellow working with NPI, attended the 2022 Teaching Kitchen Research Conference as part of her fellowship to learn about the latest research on teaching kitchens supporting equitable health outcomes.

The conference was hosted at UCLA by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Department of Nutrition in association with the Teaching Kitchen Collaborative. Teaching kitchens are a promising approach to supporting food security and cultivating lifelong habits, especially among a college student population.

UC helps home cooks turn their passion into profits

In Riverside County, 65 cooks have been approved by the county Environmental Health Department to cook and sell meals to their neighbors from their home kitchens. These innovative entrepreneurs are the first in California to take advantage of a new legal path that legitimizes and regulates what has long been part of an informal economy in many communities.

The Riverside County cooks are cooking as Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations (MEHKOs). MEHKOs are small businesses (only $50,000 gross sales per year allowed, adjusted annually for inflation) that involve home cooks preparing and selling a limited number of hot meals from their home kitchens. One of the intentions of MEHKOs is to create legal and regulated options for home cooks currently operating informal businesses, many of whom are immigrants and members of minority communities.

The UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (UC SAREP), a statewide program of UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, is working with the COOK Alliance, a coalition of home cooks and their supporters, to organize a virtual convening of home cooks, their advocates and county officials and staff. This convening will involve cooks sharing their experiences and discussions among county officials, regulators and advocates for cooks about the process of legalizing and operating MEHKOs in other counties.

The Home Cooked 2020 convening will be held via zoom on October 20 and 21, 2020, from 1 to 3 p.m. each day. Everyone is invited to join the discussion. Participation is free, but registration is required. Everyone who registers will be sent log-in information for the Zoom meeting. Register here: http://ucanr.edu/homecooked.

Denise Blackmon, proprietor of Soul Goodness, a licensed Riverside County MEHKO, says, "Being able to operate a home cooking business is especially helpful because I'm the single parent of a special needs son. This lets me work around his schedule when I am able and help support my family." Blackmon will be one of the speakers, on a panel with other home cooks, at the upcoming online event.

The option for California counties (and the four cities that have their own Environmental Health Departments) to allow permitting of MEHKOs within their counties was approved by state passage of The Homemade Food Operations Act (AB-626) in 2018, amended by AB 377 in 2019. When permitted by a county government, MEHKOs are allowed to produce and sell limited quantities of home-cooked meals from a home kitchen in any zoning in the county, including in municipalities within the county. The program is regulated, and home kitchens are inspected by the Environmental Health Department of the county that opts-in to AB-626. As of October 2020, Riverside County is the only California county that has permitted MEHKOs, although Solano, Imperial, San Mateo, Santa Barbara and the City of Berkeley are all in the process of implementing regulations for MEHKOs. Several other counties are considering doing so. Home Cooked 2020 will feature county officials and staff discussing the issues and process for issuing licenses with cooks and their advocates. The program will include break-out rooms for cooks to talk with cooks, advocates to share strategies, county staff to talk with each other across county lines, and for those helping market and support home cooks to meet together.

The COOK Alliance, with a national membership of nearly 5,000 cooks and advocates, has been since 2018 the primary advocate for home cooks, supporting county advocacy efforts for opting into AB-626 and providing education for county staff and home cooks about MEHKOs.

During the COVID19 pandemic shut-down of restaurants and catering businesses across California, many professional chefs have found themselves out of work. Some of these chefs established informal pop-up cooking businesses to try to support themselves and provide healthy cooked food for their communities. Some of these unlicensed establishments, including the "Brokeass Cooks" from Oakland, were shut down by county health departments, generating stories in local newspapers and interest in their predicament. The COOK Alliance is working with some of these chefs to advocate for legal MEHKO operations in Alameda County and other counties where they have operated. Bilal Ali, one of the Brokeass cooks, will be talking on the panel of cooks at Home Cooked 2020.

This project is supported by a Public Impact Research Initiative grant from the UCD Public Scholarship and Engagement unit.

Learn more, register here, or contact coordinator Penny Leff, paleff@ucanr.edu.

Dealing with Pantry Pests

[From the July 2015 issue of the UC IPM Retail Nursery and Garden Center IPM News] Pantry pests...

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