Shownotes Transcript
Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union, now offering real-time money movement with instant pay. Make transfers and payments instantly between financial institutions, online or through Star One's mobile app. Star One Credit Union, in your best interest.
Looking to save on internet and mobile? Get the best of both with Xfinity. Because now you can get Xfinity internet with unlimited mobile included for $25 a month for the first year. And get a free 5G phone. Switch today. Xfinity. From KQED.
From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. There's truly something to being able to cook. When you imagine what you'd like to have for dinner, get the ingredients or find them in the pantry and put everything together, it's satisfying in a way that few things in this world are.
Today, we're going to talk about how to teach kids to cook, both as a survival skill, but also as a way of familiarizing them with real food and nutrition. We've got some instructors and we've got some young chefs. They're all coming up next, right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrule. I love cooking. It's one of those things that makes me happiest. I may not be Alice Waters, but I'm pretty good around the kitchen.
It did take me well into adulthood, though, before I felt like I could make more or less anything that I wanted. There was just a base of techniques and a familiarity with ingredients that I just didn't have. Maybe most importantly, I remember the moment when something flipped for me. I was making something, can't quite remember what, and it was drying out, and I was freaking out about it because it wasn't supposed to, and my now wife was like, just add some water.
Something clicked, like I didn't have to follow rote instruction, but could begin to see the foods and ingredients as materials, things I could manipulate with, you know, water, salt, fat, acid, and yes, heat. Thank you, Samin. I really want my kids to have this ability much younger than I did. It's fun. It's empowering. It's an entree to the whole world of food systems. And also, it would be nice if they made dinner sometimes.
So far, we're one for two, but maybe after today's show, we can convert the 11-year-old. Here to talk with us about how to teach kids to cook, we're joined first by Neelam Patil, who's a chef, educator, and CEO of Bliss Belly Kitchen, also a science teacher at Berkeley Unified. Welcome. Thank you. We are also joined by Vanessa Silva, who's founder and CEO of Culinary Artistas. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you.
Vanessa, let's start with you. I mean, how did you learn to cook? Like, what was your sort of entree into this world? I was a shy kid, and it was... My mom was always pushing me to go play in the street, and I found that the kitchen was kind of a refuge place. I could shine. I could be around adults. I also always had an appetite, so I had access to the food before everybody else. But...
Pretty early on, I discovered that I had a knack for cooking, and it was something that just came somewhat naturally to me. And I was around eight years old. Oh, wow. And where were you? Where were you going? I was in Brazil. Oh, cool.
Yeah. And so were those the first foods that you learned to cook were sort of like Brazilian things or was your family making stuff from everywhere? You know, I'm from a time when you got your recipes from the Sunday paper. You know, you clip it from the Sunday paper. And there was this dish that I cooked today. It's called a muqueca. It's a Brazilian fish stew. And it sounded exotic and...
Yeah, that's my own first dish, but also my grandmother is Italian, and every Sunday she made gnocchi, aioli, and fried chicken at her house. That's a good combo. I want that combo. Yeah, it was like a potato salad with aioli, fried chicken, and gnocchi. So those are the first things I remember making with my grandma. Oh.
Neelam, how about you? How did you learn to cook?
Yeah, it's a really interesting story. I love how Vanessa was talking about the kitchen as a form of refuge. And my mom actually passed away when I was quite young. However, my fondest memories of her are standing by her side when I was eight years old and just watching her flick spices into the pan. And the stove became a symphony of flavors and smells and flavors.
just a rainbow of colors. And she would always cook us a fresh meal every day. And my family's from India and that's a very important value for us is to have freshly cooked foods. And we're also primarily vegetarian. And so we'd have lots of varieties of vegetables, lentils, and, um,
So when she passed on, I sort of fell into teaching, and that was a very wonderful expression for me. And then Bliss Belly Kitchen is sort of a love note to my mom. Oh, wow. And I've noticed that not a lot of children have... My experience with my mom is...
is very rare, actually, to have a mom who's a good cook. And a lot of parents who come to my programs say, oh, I honestly don't know how to cook. I wish I had a cooking class like yours. And so I feel so lucky to be able to share this experience with children and make them have that same feeling of safety, refuge, and joy in the kitchen. Do you remember the first dish?
dish that you felt like, okay, this is my dish. This is the thing I make. Well, I think as... It was mac and cheese, wasn't it? No. As kids, we, you know, we like sweets. So I started off baking. And my mom had this Betty Crocker...
And I just started looking at the cake recipes. And I remember I'd follow the cakes and make all these cakes. And so it wasn't particularly healthy food, but I was so happy. And the recipes came out so well. And my mom was very appreciative. That's
That's cool. I still can't bake. Maybe that's what I need to take cooking class for. We're talking about how to teach kids to cook and appreciate food with Neelam Patel, who is chef, educator, and CEO of Bliss Belly Kitchen, also a science teacher at Berkeley Unified. Hope some of your students maybe know and are listening. We're also joined by Vanessa Silva, who's founder and CEO of Culinary Artistas here in the city. We want to hear from you. Do you or did you cook with your kids? What tips do you have for teaching kids
kids to cook. Maybe how did you yourself learn? Do you have childhood memories in the kitchen with your family? You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. The email is forum at kqed.org on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram or KQED Forum. And of course, there is the Discord community as well.
Vanessa, let's talk about sort of the basics. Like, what do you tell parents? You know, maybe they're not going to go to a cooking class, but they are at home with their kids. What do you tell them? Like, how do you sort of walk your kids into cooking? I think learning to cook is like learning to do anything else. And if you look at it from the perspective of the kid, as a parent, you want your kid to feel successful right off the bat. You want them to have a good time.
And you want them, the earlier, the younger they are, you want them to see the result of the process right away. You know, if like sometimes like you work for a long time and that thing disappears in the oven and by the time it comes back because the kid has moved on.
So I think what I like to tell parents is start simple. Start young. Start simple. And just... There's so many activities that you can share with the kid in the kitchen that they can...
that starts this positive, successful relationship of them with the food. So let's say you have a two-year-old, you can get them to just pluck herbs. You know, like they, Step one, grow herbs. Yeah, you know, so that's the other thing. You can grow them. But you know, like let's say, let's be realistic. We don't all,
like grow our herbs right off the bat. So start like early, like maybe wash the herbs. Kids love to play with water, right? And like just get to smell it, get to see the colors. Then from then on, like just I think chopping is something that every kid loves to do, right? Like start with things that are soft. You know, maybe you can do fruit, you can do banana, you can do berries. So that's something that they can just kind of get going right away.
Another tip that I think is really important for parents that are beginning with it is like, and it's a great way to remove any anxiety or sense of like hurry or accomplishment is create time to cook with your kids that is aside from when you're trying to make dinner and put it on the table. You know, just make it. And if you only have 15 minutes, if you only have half an hour, that's okay. But you are not rushing. You are not trying like you're not.
Putting that pressure on the kid. Right, right, right. They can pick it up when you like fly in the door and you're like, we got to get stuff on the table, you know? Yeah. Kids are really good to feel their parents' anxiety or to feel the pressure. So take that pressure away from the beginning. Help them just have fun with it. Remember that is a bonding activity, not something that they are a burden to the parent. I think those are...
Just the start of it. I love that. You know, it's also, it's interesting. How do we deal? Well, let's bring in Greg. Greg's got a good point about this. Greg in Oakland. Welcome.
Hey, good morning, guys. You know, my point is just – and it's probably supporting what's starting to be talked about here. My daughter cut herself with a knife this morning cooking breakfast for my wife and I. And it just brought back – it brought out this understanding that I have about what I'm doing, which is to let her cook.
And it's the hardest thing for some people to actually just stand back out of arm's reach and let your child try something. But the magic that happens when they succeed is far greater than if you just open a box of biscuits or something. It's just magic to watch them learn and feel the experience of cooking. Is she okay, Greg? I would just...
What's that? Is she okay? Oh, she's... Yeah, she's great. She got a little nick on her finger. She said, Daddy, look, I didn't even cry. And it was really great.
And the last thing I'll say is to let your kids make soups because they will make the most bombastic soups you have ever seen in your life. And they will be so proud of them. And they're not that bad to eat. Any comments you have on that? Thank you, Greg. Really appreciate that. Neil, I mean, I think this is one of the things that parents worry about, right? It's like kids are going to get...
hurt either with a knife or they're going to burn themselves or these kinds of things. How do you deal both with that fear, both for parents, but also for the kids too?
Yeah. Well, there are certain tools. And just to build off of the conversation we've been having, there are certain tools you can actually buy your child, like a child-safe knife with a stubby handle and a zigzag. And those are available on Amazon. So those are knives that children can use even from the age of a toddler. And they're strong enough to cut harder vegetables like potatoes and carrots and celery, but it's impossible to cut yourself.
And I love what this recent caller just shared because I love the freedom that he's giving his child. It's sort of like you have to think of it like learning to ride a bike. When you have your child is learning to ride a bike independently, they're going to fall. And so allowing them that space to make mistakes is
And one strategy I'm going to share from our summer camps that we offer is we have a philosophy. It's called sharp knives, sharp minds. And we talked to the kids about, well, is it safe to use a dull knife in the kitchen? And they say no, no.
Because you end up putting more effort and you could cut yourself. What about a dull mind? How safe is that? And then I ask them, how many of you have seen your parents try to cook in the kitchen and they're stressed out? Does the food come out well? And they say no. They're very honest.
And like so many mistakes can happen if your mind is not clear. And so in our philosophy is that we practice breath work and pranayama and yoga. That's why our special offering is the yoga of cooking. I love that. We are talking about how to teach kids to cook with Neelam Patil, who's a chef, educator and CEO of Bliss Valley Kitchen. We're also joined by Vanessa Silva, founder and CEO of
Culinary Artistas. We're going to be back with more after the break. You might want to try the email address if you want to get in on this conversation, forum at kqed.org. We'll be back with more right after the break.
Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We are talking about how to teach kids to cook.
We're joined by a couple of food educators, Vanessa Silva and Neelam Patil. We want to add another voice into this conversation. She's a former contestant on Top Chef Junior, also author of the cookbook Flavor Plus Us, Cooking for Everyone. Rohana Bizarret Martinez, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me. It's so exciting to be here. Yeah. So how did you get into this? Like, what made you interested in cooking to the point where you were like a contestant on a show as a kid?
Yeah, I loved cooking from a really young age. My family always was cooking and we'd go to the farmer's markets and they'd let me pick out a fruit that I really found interesting or a vegetable I'd never seen. And then we'd take it home and we'd be able to cook and make new dishes from it. So I think having...
I don't know, just the opportunity to experience so many different types of foods really brought me into cooking and made me love it a lot. What was your first, like, go-to thing where you'd, like, be able to go into the kitchen and just kind of whip it up? Ooh. You know, I always loved making, I want to say tostadas, because my family always had tortillas. We always had, like, beans and staples and things like that. And so I would like to use the, like...
tortillas from dinner the night before and add beans and maybe cut up some zucchini and put them on top. And I love a fried egg, which is not traditional, but I would also add it to that. So we had fried eggs to everything. Apparently, you know, even in this economy. Yeah. Um,
You also worked with some like big name chefs in the Bay Area. Did you know you wanted to like become a food influencer? Was it like that kind of thing? Or were you just like you really wanted to know what it was like to work in a professional kitchen?
Yeah, absolutely not. I really wanted to cook on a competition show because I saw ads and I was like, this seems like so much fun. And in hindsight, I wasn't like, this is going to be on national TV or anything like that for whatever reason. And then I really wanted to learn more after that experience. And that's when I first interned at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. And I fell in love with the environment and just the...
Fresh vegetables that would come in from a farmer's from... I can't remember exactly where, but all the chefs and the cooks who just had so much passion and excitement about food and cooking and the guests, and that really sucked me into the restaurant industry. Do you think you're going to stick with... I mean, you're now at Cornell, so you're in the Ivy League. Are you going to use that degree and go into the food industry, or what are you going to do? Yeah, I...
I've learned a lot more about the business side of restaurants and food. And you're running screaming from it? No, not at all. It's only made me more excited to hopefully open a restaurant of my own one day. I had the pleasure of working at Gramercy Tavern last summer, and I learned a lot more about East Coast cooking and that type of style. And so, yeah, being in school is really...
Open my eyes to just all different sides of restaurants besides just the operation level. And it's been really exciting. That's cool. I'm going to route a caller to you. Stay with us here. Anu in Cupertino. Welcome. Hi. Can you hear me? Yeah, sure can. Go ahead.
Yeah, I have a two-part question. So I'm Indian by origin, and just like Neelam was mentioning too, I cook fresh food, like I cook twice a day, to the point where cooking is now so stressful amidst working and having two kids. So how do I make it less stressful because, A, I don't get participation from the rest of the family, and then I have a high schooler too, and an internet.
and an elementary school kid. The elementary school kid is always in the kitchen wanting to help and learn stuff, but the high schooler with their schedule just doesn't come into the kitchen. So any tips or pointers to engage a high schooler and to just make cooking less stressful for me? Yeah, it's such a good question. I think even people who love cooking can sometimes find themselves in this spot where they're just like,
Oh, boy. Another lunch to make, you know. So, yeah. Rahana, how about how about you? How about from the perspective of like a high schooler who loved cooking? What do you think might be a way in to capture this high schooler? And then, Neil, I'm going to come to you on the broader question.
Yeah, I think growing up, something that I really loved about food was the agency that my family gave me to pick certain recipes. And maybe we wouldn't do everything that I found online on different websites and things, but we could incorporate just one sauce or a certain type of bread into the meal. And that was really exciting because then I also wanted to help out and cook as well for dinner. And I was excited to eat it. And
having meals together became something that I really enjoyed and really looked forward to. Yeah. Neal? Well, I mean, I think dealing with high schoolers is challenging. So I want to acknowledge that. Says the Berkeley Unified teacher. That's why I teach elementary. But I think maybe even just putting aside an hour in the week where all of you, you and your elementary age child and your high school age child are
And maybe the whole family, maybe pulling your husband too and or your partner and and you're all sort of meal prepping. And what I like to call meal prepping is I actually don't like to cook lunch.
large batches of food and store them in the kitchen. I like to, like I mentioned, I like to cook fresh every day, but I like to chop vegetables ahead of time and just have them available in containers. So then I can immediately just grab a handful of chopped kale or a handful of chopped zucchini and make whatever dish I want to make. So I think involving them in that, and I love what the other guest has mentioned about
giving them agency in terms of what's being cooked in the kitchen, maybe involving your high schooler in menu planning as well. Yeah. I mean, here's my question.
We have one kid who would probably just make mac and cheese every single day. How do you balance the sort of... Because you want the kids to have this freedom of choice. You want them to make things that they're going to like and want. And also, what if it really is just cakes and mac and cheese every single day? How do you encourage the kids, Vanessa, to explore the wide world of vegetables is what I'm asking. Yeah, having...
I think there's something to you giving choices, but not a completely open choice. What do you want today again? But do we want this or that? So kind of giving choice, but limiting a little bit of the choice. And I think your kid is seven years old? Nine, nine years older. Yeah, so having that, but also having for them to have the predictability that the mac and cheese will fit somewhere in the week. Mm-hmm.
So they know that what, you know, their deepest desire will manifest at some point, but having these other choices that are kind of a little bit less wide. And then I think with the teenager, I have a 15-year-old, and I started culinary artisans or even before when she was three and like to really to have her. And over the years, she kind of like faded away from the kitchen. But I think I want to reinforce the idea that the whole –
concept of agency is everything and like maybe having the teenager be the author and of either the menu or the whole dinner let's say once a week and like you know at first it's not going to be the maybe not the best dinner of the week but creating that and like so they don't have to be cooking with parents but they can be
Yeah. Some of our listeners had these kinds of rules that seemed to have pushed things forward. You know, Ruth writes, my sister had a rule in her house. Each child had one night per week when they would prepare dinner. Whatever they wanted, whatever they cooked, the family ate. Some very interesting dishes were served. Darian writes, as a Gen X kid of two working parents, I was responsible for making dinner twice a week at age nine. The Fannie Farmer Jr. cookbook started me off. Eventually, I found other cookbooks I liked.
Yes. What do you think, Neal?
Absolutely. I know that as a child, I was also allowed to express my creativity. And I think that giving kids that agency to but also with the structure is, you know, and also one other thing I wanted to bring up is I follow a system called Ayurveda, which is the sister science to yoga.
And it's all about health, lifestyle, and nutrition. And according to Ayurveda, you have... There's different ages, meaning like when you're young, your tastes are different. So young children actually...
prefer sweeter food. So you may notice that they are craving carbohydrates and they want pasta with butter and cheese and nothing else. Don't we all want that though? But what is that green thing in my pasta? So knowing that that's sort of part of the age, but then also setting those expectations that vegetables are going to be part of every meal. And also involving the kids. I think
I hear what you're saying when you're, you know, you're running from one practice and you're picking up one kid and you're dropping off another and then you come in and there's nothing made and you have to make dinner and everyone's hungry. So how, what are you going to do? But,
Creating some time for if you train all your kids in knife skills, then everyone can participate together as opposed to like reheating something that's frozen. You can you can create something together. And I think some of that is a learning curve and it's going to take some structure and some planning on the parents part. But it's a it's a it's a worthwhile investment. That's cool.
We are talking about how to teach kids to cook and appreciate food with Neelam Patil, who is the CEO of Bliss Belly Kitchen, also a science teacher at Berkeley Unified in the elementary schools, I now know. Vanessa Silva joins us as well. She's founder and CEO of Culinary Artistas. We also have Rahana Bissaret-Martinez, who's a chef and a student at Cornell. You can actually get her cookbook at
Flavor plus us cooking for everyone. Am I saying that right? Is it flavor and us or flavor plus us? Flavor plus us. Flavor plus us. Perfect. Cooking for everyone. And we would love to invite you into the conversation. If you can't get through on the phone, lots of people want to talk about this topic. So you might want to try Blue Sky, Instagram, or the email forum at kqed.org.
Let's bring in one more guest. Aria Karayil is a sixth grader at Diablo Vista Middle School and a recent contestant on Kids Baking Championship. Welcome, Aria. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, man. Thank you for joining us. I also have a sixth grader, so they would probably not be able to do this. So I'm very proud of you already. What got you interested in cooking?
So I got interested into like baking because during COVID, you know, everybody was in lockdown. There wasn't much to do. So my mom was baking things like cakes and macarons at the time. I used to kind of like just admire her. I'm like, wow, that's a lot of stuff. Looks hard, but looks fun.
So then I just started like watching her. And over time, I helped her. Like I'd hold her hand while piping or whisk together some ingredients. And then sooner or later, I took over the kitchen. Oh, man. You know, I noticed on your Instagram, Aria Sweets and Treats, that you are, macarons are like your specialty, it seems like, yeah? Yeah. Why is that? What do you like about them?
I really like macarons because they're really hard to make. But like, once you finally nail it, you perfect it, you feel like really good. You're like, wow, I made something like that not a lot of people know how to do.
So it really feels good. And you're like, oh, my God, I fell in love with these. I also I loved your ones for Holi, the colorful ones with the thandai filling. Those are just looked totally beautiful. Was that something you came up with? Was was that like a viral TikTok recipe you were following? Like what was the deal there?
So my mom and I, so my family is from India and like we were celebrating Holi and my mom's like, you know, let's make some Indian flavors. And we normally do like rose mango. So we thought to just like switch it up and do that. And it turned out really tasty. Yeah.
Have you been able to get any of your friends into this or are they like, oh, okay, you're the baker. I play volleyball. Or like has your success in the kitchen kind of spread in your school?
I mean, like a lot of my friends, we've tried baking for like parties, decorating cakes. They're all like, Aria, how do I do this? I don't know how to do this. So I've become like more the baker of the group. But they've all, I feel like definitely expanded into baking a lot more. Do you have just like a single piece of advice for other kids or maybe parents who want to get their kids into cooking?
Um, my advice is to start from somewhere small. Don't go up and like start with something big. Don't be like me who want to start off with like a two tier cake from like something small, like a box cake, cupcakes, brownies, cookies, and like just start from there and like expand over time, the flavors and size and the complexity of the dessert. Yeah.
Um, actually I was asking for me. I'm a terrible baker. So, okay. Now I'm going to go home, make some lemon bars, maybe. Um, uh, last thing, what was it like baking on a TV show? Was it fun?
It was really fun. It was a great experience. I met a lot of new friends who enjoyed baking as much as me. We all exchanged recipes and we help each other a lot. But it was also really nerve wracking because I'm not used to having being like a time bake. You have to and like out of the blue, they'll just come up with a challenge. I'm like, oh, wow. I was not expecting that.
So you really have to think on your feet. And that was the really nerve wracking part. So good. So good. Let's bring in another call here. Let's bring in Jane in Nevada. Welcome, Jane.
Hi, thank you. I wanted to say that my grandmother taught me to cook. She had a pretty big kitchen compared to our kitchen at home. And the first thing I remember, she taught me how to poach eggs. I still don't know how to poach eggs. Everyone's doing all this stuff I don't know how to do. That's like poaching eggs is still the toughest way to make eggs as far as I'm concerned. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. Well,
And they're my go-to, and I was probably seven or eight. And then she would say, okay, now we're going to put the toast in, and she would time the egg to the toast. So I learned about timing. She also, you know, she made it fun. And she had a Fannie Farmer cookbook, and we made a big –
a favorite chocolate cake from there. I learned about measuring. We also, with my grandfather, this was kind of his dish where he put on the big apron and all that when he would do Joe's special. So there were some San Francisco specific things
Wait, what was Joe's special? What was Joe's special? What's Joe's special? Oh, well, that's what they make at the Joe's restaurants. It's a hamburger, sauteed hamburger, mushroom, egg, spinach, and you have it with French bread and ketchup. I...
I don't know. Does that sound good? I don't know. All the guests in the studio are all kind of like, well, I'm not... Like, you go to Original Joe's, Westlake Joe's, Marin Joe's. Right, right, right. So there was stuff like that, and she would make something called a Sir Francis Drake salad. Wow.
which I think, and I think it's like a Waldorf probably, but probably from the hotel. - That maybe, yeah, you went around and stole all the ingredients from your neighbors and put them in the shop. - Yeah, yeah. So the kinds of food were, they were a bit heavy.
And that's not how I cook, but it was just, it was a bonding experience. And then in my 20s, I just, I went to Judith Hogan's San Francisco Home Chef. And it just, my grandmother just cemented a lifelong love. I love it.
Hey, Jane in Nevada. Thanks. Thanks so much for calling in. A couple of comments to run through here. We got some really, you know, people really connect with their cultures through food. So you've got Laura saying, you know, I was fortunate to have amazing cooks from both sides of my family. My dad was so talented and self-taught. I grew up in Venice, Italy, where food was revered. I wasn't really taught how to cook, but I absorbed the methods, the passion, the care and love language food represented in my family.
There are five exclamation points after that.
Diana writes, when my son and daughter were 7 and 11, I bought a fun cookbook for kids, and each week they took turns picking a dish, making a shopping list, cooking their dish. It was hugely fun and successful. They're both enthusiastic cooks as adults and involve their children in everything going on in the kitchen. Keep those comments coming in to forum at kqed.org. We'll be back with more with our guests right after the break.
What makes a great pair of glasses? At Warby Parker, it's all the invisible extras without the extra cost. Their designer quality frames start at $95, including prescription lenses, plus scratch-resistant, smudge-resistant, and anti-reflective coatings, and UV protection, and free adjustments for life.
To find your next pair of glasses, sunglasses, or contact lenses, or to find the Warby Parker store nearest you, head over to warbyparker.com. That's warbyparker.com. You may get a little excited when you shop at Burlington.
I'm saving so much! Burlington saves you up to 60% off other retailers' prices every day. Will it be the low prices or the great brands? You'll love the deals. You'll love Burlington. I told you so.
Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We are talking about how to teach kids to cook and appreciate food. We're joined by Vanessa Silva, founder and CEO of Culinary Artistas. Neelam Patil, who's a chef, educator, and CEO of Bliss Belly Cuisine.
They teach people how to cook. Their kids how to cook. So you can check out those spots. We also have a sixth grader at Diablo Vista Middle School, Aria Carayil, with us. Recent contestant on Kids Baking Championship. And we have Rohana Bissaret-Martinez, who's a young chef, former contestant on Top Chef Junior, and author of the cookbook Flamingo.
Flavor and us cooking for everyone. Let's bring in Sari in Tiburon. Welcome, Sari. Hello. Hi. Can you hear me? Yeah, sure can. Go ahead.
Great. Thank you so much for this discussion. It's such an important topic, and we're so excited to be just on it. I'm Sari from Kids Cooking for Life, and we are a nonprofit organization teaching nutrition and cooking skills to kids in the Bay Area. This is exactly what we do. We travel to the schools, and we stay for a whole semester for several years teaching kids cooking,
because guess what? They're not getting this education at school and many are not getting the practice at home. And so I want to share what we see in our school over and over and over again. And over the semester, we see...
the amazing transformation of their attitude from, "I don't like vegetables. I'm not going to eat this. No, it's not for me." And by the middle of the term, they say, "Oh, I didn't know the vegetables could taste this good."
And we see so many kids who have never touched an onion, never seen a broccoli. But after about eight to ten weeks of our class, and it's just one hour a week, just one hour, we see a shift in their attitude all the time. I mean, we see this all the time. And by the way, we have a wonderful vegetable mac and cheese recipe on our website for next week.
Yeah, cauliflower hates to see my kids coming. They do. My kids like a lot of these things. But in part, I think, you know, maybe it's because of like the kind of leftover hangover of like health food culture. It was like, on the one hand, you'd have like
fettuccine alfredo on this side and then it'd be like and here's broccoli without salt without any fat or oil or butter and like you're like well i wonder which one of these a kid might like or i might like more you know and so it's i do think there's a there's a sense of trying to make vegetables more appealing meal i mean you want to talk about that oh yeah
And I want to congratulate Sari for her work because I, as a school teacher, see this all the time. And I actually had a conversation with my students where they love flaming hot Cheetos and Doritos. And we actually just said, let's turn over the label.
and we're going to count the number of ingredients. And then I talked to them about it, and we found over 30. Yeah. And then we talked- Can melt them down and turn them into a pair of sunglasses. Exactly. And then I said, do you know that there's an ingredient in here that makes you addicted? Yeah.
And and then we compared that to a bag of organic dried pineapple, which has one ingredient and is delicious as a snack. And so I asked this kid, do you want to still eat this? And he said no. And so that was it's like empowering the kids, educating them.
Food is no longer a personal issue. It is a political issue. And our food system, we need to teach our children to be detectives of what's going what they're in detectives of the food supply, the American food supply. And it's a very important issue that we need to educate our kids about, because if they don't know it, they're innocently, you know, these big food companies are
They're using, you know, millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to market to children to make them addicted. And then the food has MSG, which is addictive. Right. And it's linked to obesity and it makes you eat more. Right. Right. Rihanna, you know, obviously you were cooking a Chez Panisse, which is kind of like the, the,
a central node in this new understanding of our food system and how it needs to change. And now you're in college, which at least in my time, people did not eat well in college, right? But the Flaming Hot Cheetos were sort of more of a philosophy than just an individual product. Do you find that kids are like high school, college students are eating differently as a result of kind of places like Chez Panisse kind of bringing that knowledge around?
I think there is definitely a huge impact on my campus with the work of so many environmental justice advocates. We have Annabelle's, which is our subsidized grocery store that has a fridge where people bring home-cooked meals. We also have a co-op system where 18 college students all live in a house together and they cook a meal for everyone every night of the week.
And so that has been like a really sweet community to be a part of as well. And in some ways, I think there's a lot of impacts on food for college students on my campus. But in other ways, there's like the only...
We really have here are like McDonald's and Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. And so, you know, if it's not homemade, it is more fast food and accessible food and things like that. I would be a little sad if college students weren't eating pizza at 2 a.m. sometimes. You know, like I do feel like that's sort of part of the experience. It does happen, yeah. Let's bring in Kira in Pinole. Welcome.
Hi, this is a great conversation. I'm a chef as well. And I always I have a son who's eight and I always encourage parents. I've worked with kids and teenagers and I've always found that baking is a great way to improve.
bring out creativity. It's also a great tool for science and math. And you can also, I'm hearing the conversation about how to hide vegetables. It's a fantastic way to hide vegetables with all kinds of ingredients, from zucchini to pumpkin, even spinach and kale, like
Baking is a great way to do that. And I used to hold a class for teens in a teen treatment center, and I would do bread making, which kind of brings about this like meditative place that you can kind of sit and be mindful of.
while kneading bread instead of letting the mixer knead the bread and just kind of getting your hands into what you're making. People all across the age ranges are so much more excited to eat what they've produced, especially when it takes time.
baking does. So, yeah, that's my comment. And I love this conversation. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. You know, Aria, do you think that baking has helped you in your in your math classes or in or thinking about science?
I think baking has helped me in math because like the measuring cups and all, it's definitely helped me in like fractions and all. And it definitely like changes my perspective of things. Like I'll see one fourth on paper and think, oh, a fourth cup of, I don't know, four.
I love that. Yeah. No, I mean, that totally makes sense to me, actually. A couple of comments I'm going to bring over to you, Vanessa. Amy writes, when I was 16, my mom put me in charge of the kitchen for the summer. I could cook whatever I wanted, but
But they had to eat what I made. I bought a fun international cookbook and learned to do the shopping as well. My favorite meal I remember was making trout amandine. It was so good that my parents asked me to make it when my father's co-worker came to dinner. He honestly raved about it, and I felt like I had achieved a new level that summer set me up for cooking the rest of my life.
Nancy writes, and this is what I want to ask you about, Vanessa. Sometimes you have to wait. When she was a child, I called my daughter a vegetarian who doesn't eat vegetables. Always a picky eater and not that interested in cooking. In the last year, as a 30-something, she has suddenly burst into the cooking world, especially with the website Smitten Kitchen, and is constantly sending me photos of the great things that she makes.
Talk to me about that. Like when you have a kid in the class, say, who's like, sorry, I only eat buttered pasta. Like how do you how do you work with that kid just to, you know, expand the horizons or just waiting or whatever? How do you do it? Yeah. Actually, about 10 years ago, I went back to school. I'm a food engineer.
And 10 years ago, I went back to school. Thank you for your work on Flaming Hot Cheetos. There we go. We're going to get to that. I went back to school to study holistic nutrition. And my thesis was around how to entice kids to eat healthy.
wholesome foods without bringing the concept of healthy foods. And there's three things that I found in my research. The first one is about full body and full engagement in the process from like the beginning of like picking an ingredient, picking an herb to, you know, or a theme to all the way to cooking and getting. The second one is positive behavior.
peer pressure, no pressure, but just having an environment where other people are genuinely interested in trying something. So it might be in a class or else it might be in the family. And the third one is really kind of absorbing and observing the environment
of the people around them and forming great memories around that food. So if your kid, and as Nealon was saying, there are phases of palate, right? If your kid is not yet interested in healthy foods,
just keep them around. Keep being excited about it. Kids really pick up on their parents. When I see an amazing tomato at the peak of the summer, my mouth is watering. I'm talking about that. I'm in the farmer's market. I'm talking. Just your own
towards that food and really keep on bringing that without the pressure is really important. So I'm actually, I want to say that I'm actually against the concept of hiding vegetables in the food. It's just like bring them to the surface, highlight them and know that at some point you're,
they will, you will kind of get their curiosity around it. I think that's a big one. And then another one that has to do with the teens and also goes back to the kid and how to get kids to more interested in healthy foods is the concept of 80-20 that you can apply to everybody.
If 80% of the foods that you're being exposed to and you're eating, you're cooking are wholesome foods, there is that 20% that are like, I'm not going to pick a fight with my daughter's hot Cheetos. But, you know, but 80% of the time we are eating great foods. Whole foods. Yes. Nutritious things. And, you know, don't put the broccoli against the fettuccine Alfredo. Maybe you can have a broccoli Alfredo.
I think it's really important to not go full on crazy about the healthy stuff. I actually, this is a real story. I have the sister of a friend that was a
a personal trainer in New York City, and they were crazy about health. Their kids were picking up the wrappers of the food from the garbage at school. They wanted to like, you know. They're like, I'm tired of carob chips. Yeah, so give them a chance to have some wins there and make those things interesting. Let's bring in Noreen in Oakland. Welcome, Noreen.
Well, good morning. I can't believe I got in. This is such a popular subject. I wanted to bring up two things. One is you have to have a garden because then the children are the ones picking the cherry tomatoes and plucking the tarragon and the basil and things like that. And secondly, one thing we did, I had four kids at one point, we would pick a country
and cook a meal from that country, like Iran or Eritrea, and then one of the kids would stand up and read something about that country. And it was really, really fun. We would literally spin the globe and let our finger land on something. And then a friend of mine came in from Arkansas and said, "You ain't never had squirrel and dumpling?"
Then, yeah, next step, find a squirrel, I suppose. Noreen, thanks so much for that call. I do, I feel like the garden, I mean, I'm a big gardener, and I do think that has had a real effect on the kids in terms of them wanting to engage with the things that we have grown to the point where I feel like they get, like, even just really bored. We've had so many beautiful cherry tomatoes at a certain point, they're like, yeah, okay. And
Another beautiful cherry tomato in California. Thanks, Dad. You know, I know Rahana Bizarret-Martinez has to go. Thank you so much for joining us. Former contestant on Top Chef Junior. I look forward to you opening your restaurant here in the Bay. Thank you so much for having me. Victor in San Francisco. Welcome.
Hey, how are you doing? I think if you're going to teach your kids how to cook, you have to first declutter the pantry or wherever you put your pots and pans. And even better, take them shopping because kids get into equipment, right? When I was when my kids were in Little League basketball,
they really wanted to get the best bat shoes and everything so if you approach it like that and getting started from the beginning buying the right equipment and then uh you know storing it well not putting uh uh pots on on your pants etc you know just like taking care of the equipment and also you could take a vegetable and use different spices
You know, cook it the same day with different, like some with, I don't know, pepper and salted pepper or cayenne or, you know, get different flavors of the same vegetable the same day so they can experiment. But yeah, getting the equipment is essential, I believe.
Yeah. No, I love that. I totally remember that. Like getting a good basketball when you were playing basketball. And it totally makes sense. Having a pan that you feel like is yours or a knife you feel like is yours feels to me like a key component of all this. A couple comments from listeners. Kathy writes, my grandson is almost five and I've included him with meal prep when he was two years old in
in the high chair. He added ingredients to the bowl, stirred things up, added pepper with guidance, et cetera. Now he can scoop ingredients with measuring cups and add those ingredients in. His dad has him helping with making pizza, Saturday morning waffles, et cetera. He also just made his own checkerboard citrus cake. His parents just bought him kid safe knives like you were talking about earlier. Uh, I got him children's cooking mitts and an apron. Also to Victor's point about the, uh, the, the nature of the gear. Uh,
Aria, Karayu, I want to give you the last word here. What's something we should all try and get our kids, or if we are kids, what's something we should make this weekend? I'd say that you should make a batch of cookies or brownies because in my family, that's something we all enjoy. And I hope everyone else enjoys brownies too because they're my favorite.
I love that idea. I do have a confession to make that I have never once made cookies. So maybe that's actually, I know, I know. Vanessa, Neelam, do either of you want to shout out one thing that maybe a kid could make? Yeah, Vanessa. Yeah.
We're just starting spring, so there's a lot of great fresh fruit out. If you haven't ever made your own granola, have you? Yeah. Making granola is really easy, and you can make a parfait. There's so much. You can start, if you've never cooked before, just buy the granola, buy the fruit, and layer. Kids love the layering and choose the fruit. If you are already a little bit more advanced, make your granola and then layer from that. I love that. That's a big win. Parfait.
I will share what we just made recently. We just took some zucchini, yellow squash and tomato and bell pepper. We chopped it up. We involved the kids in chopping.
And sauteed it with some olive oil and salt and oregano. And it just became this beautiful, colorful rainbow. And the kids loved it. Ah, delicious. We have been talking about how to teach kids to cook and appreciate food with Neelam Patil, who is a chef, educator, and CEO of Bliss Belly Kitchen. You can check that out. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Also been joined by Vanessa Silva, founder and CEO of Culinary Artistas. Thank you, Vanessa. Thank you.
And we've been joined by Aria Carayo, who is a sixth grader at Diablo Vista Middle School and a recent contestant on Kids Baking Championship. Thank you, Aria. Thank you so much for having me.
The 9 o'clock hour forum is produced by Grace Wan, Blanca Torres, Ted Speoli and Dan Zoll. Our interns are Brian Vo and Jesse Fisher. Jennifer Ng is our engagement producer. Francesca Fenzi is our digital community producer. Judy Campbell is the lead producer. Danny Bringer and Chris Beal are our engineers. Katie Springer is the operations manager of KQED Podcasts.
Our VP of News is Ethan Tobin-Lindsey, and our Chief Content Officer is Holly Kernan. It is Friday. Have a great weekend. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim.
Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union, now offering real-time money movement with instant pay. Make transfers and payments instantly between financial institutions, online or through Star One's mobile app. Star One Credit Union, in your best interest.
Looking to save on internet and mobile? Get the best of both with Xfinity. Because now you can get Xfinity internet with unlimited mobile included for $25 a month for the first year. And get a free 5G phone. Switch today. Xfinity.
Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life. You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it. So my first reaction was, ha ha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was, wait a minute, I'm a journalist. Is this real? And I think we will see a Twitch streamer president maybe within our lifetimes. You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.