Cultivating Cooks

Schelck and March have designed a 10-week program that takes kids through the food cycle from seedlings to harvesting a garden, reading and writing recipes, simple cooking and taste testing. Classroom segments are designed to fit into the 50-minute school periods and every component of Cultivating Cooks’ workshops has a tasting or cooking aspect to highlight the connection between all the processes and where food comes from.

The pair works with teachers to make sure the workshops tie into some part of the already existing curriculum, given that teachers cannot deviate too much from what they already have to teach.

“Teachers have a ton to do, they have so much content to get into those little kids’ brains before the end of the school year,” March explains, but she says that every teacher they’ve worked with so far has been keen to find a link. In Grade 5, for example, they tied their workshops into classes on renewable energy and in Grade 3 they made the link with their unit on soil — easy subjects to segue to food and food production.

Once the Cultivating Cooks’ materials are translated, they’ll be set to work with the schools’ French immersion programs as well. Cultivating Cooks also has a roster of volunteers — chefs, bee keepers, food producers — who share their vision and specialized knowledge during the workshops.

March says bringing the program into classrooms is important since kids are already in an educational environment. Schelck says that surrounded by their friends, they’re more likely to be keen to try something new, “We all know how parents try to get vegetables in — in this environment we make it fun and when they see their peers tasting, they’re more likely to get into it.”

It’s a sentiment that Tony Christoforatos and Kent Van Dyk echo. Both are chefs and teachers in Longfields Davidson Heights Secondary School’s (LDHSS) culinary program and would like to see food education integrated in some way from kindergarten to Grade 12. Money is an issue. Van Dyk calls food education “vitally important... and a valuable life skill that engages them on a lot of different levels [such as] the environment, social enterprises, social inequalities and trade,” to name a few. But for food education to be incorporated board- or province-wide, funding would be required to develop teaching materials and, potentially, facilities.

LDHSS is unique. The school has two fully equipped kitchens and is one of a few high schools in Ottawa that offers a culinary and hospitality related Specialist High Skills Major (SHSM). The SHSM at LDHSS lets students interested in the culinary and hospitality industries choose courses that focus on that career path while completing requirements to receive their high school diploma. They have about 20 students a year completing the SHSM and approximately 200 students in 12 classes in the culinary arts program, which runs classes in Grades 9 through 12. Christoforatos and Van Dyk have seen the program triple in size; there were only four classes when LDHSS first opened nine years ago.

Every class begins with labs on knife and kitchen safety and includes lessons on fundamental cooking techniques before students apply them on their own. Christoforatos teaches all the Grade 9 classes and likes to base lessons around cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner. A highlight for grade 10s is demonstrating some of the techniques they’ve learned at the end of the semester by making pizza from scratch. That means making their own dough and properly simmered sauce, pulling their own mozzarella or making ricotta (Van Dyk says they’re essentially “trying to teach them things without them realizing they’re learning science”). There are Iron Chef-type challenges and Black Box competitions that push students to tap into their creativity and showcase their training. Senior students also learn about business plans, restaurant management and costing ingredients and can participate in catering gigs. To raise funds for the program, Grade 12 students sell lunch to teachers on “Souper Fridays” with a soup and side they’ve made — from scratch, of course.

A highlight for many of the students is the annual Food for Thought dinner, held in January ever year. The event has students working with some of the city’s best known chefs to create a six-course meal with (non-alcoholic) drink pairings. Mentored by kitchen and service professionals, students pull off an impressive dinner for more than 100 guests, with proceeds going to charity. Anna March has twice been one of the chef-mentors at the event, which often sees chefs returning year after year to work with the students.