"Cook With Me": Integrating Culture, Community, and Nutrition

 

By Grace Achepohl, Health Fellow

Six families join Community Chef Jess Cho and Gloria Cahuich-González, SNAP-Ed Connection Nutrition and Education Policy Specialist, to celebrate our final “Cook With Me” event of 2022.

Like many schools at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Primary School made a difficult decision to temporarily close our doors in an attempt to protect students and families. Two years later, it is more clear than ever that the removal of students from structured school settings disproportionately affected families most impacted by systemic racism and poverty.

This is especially apparent in our community, East Palo Alto, where food insecurity ranks the second highest in San Mateo County (1). During the pandemic, food insecurity in San Mateo County rose by as much as 14 to 17 percent for households with children (2). The combination of school closures and loss of regular meals for many children, along with the pandemic’s negative impact on household income stability, resulted in severe food insecurity. Given that the odds of a child being obese are “five times higher for children from food insecure households compared to children from food secure households,” (3) we also saw increased rates of childhood obesity. Compared to pre-pandemic times, the CDC (4) reports the monthly rate of increase in children’s BMI (age 2 to 19) “nearly doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic.” In other words, from 2019 to 2020, an additional 3.1% of children in this study (13,401 children) became obese.

Addressing childhood obesity is complex and requires a multi-pronged approach. Diets are often not effective (5), and weight control practices in young children reliably predict (6) weight gain (regardless of baseline weight) in adolescence. Therefore, as a school that fundamentally believes in the power of integration across education, families, and health care, we knew we needed to be creative to continue promoting healthy eating practices and nutrition during this time. Using a community based and design centered approach, we asked students, families, staff, and community members what nutrition meant to them. Answers echoed each other: culture and community. How could we combine cooking, culture, and community (especially amidst the ongoing COVID-19 surges)?

 

A fourth grade student, prepares the batter for pajeon.

A first grade student and her mom pour the pajeon batter onto the hot skillet.

 

Based on this community feedback, we developed our “Cook With Me” series to promote healthy eating practices while sharing ideas and practical knowledge of cooking in a culturally respectful and community-centered way. We invited community chefs from different cultural backgrounds to lead one-hour bilingual virtual cooking sessions. In partnership with SNAP-Ed Connection (7), we were able to provide each family with all of the necessary ingredients and a cookbook. All that was left was for families to join us and cook. Held at dinner time, we had more than 12 families join each session, including participation of children aged two through ten. Together we learned new recipes, shared stories, and tried different foods such as sauteed okra, chile relleno, and pajeon. The community-driven space brought children into the kitchen, gave parents the opportunity to ask questions, and provided a space for joy in the midst of the chaos of COVID-19. With any new program, obstacles are inevitable. Limitations to the programming included a lack of internet access, difficulties navigating Zoom, barriers with live translation, ease of food distribution, and resource disparities (such as families not having access to a stove top). By community request, we eventually transitioned the events in-person so all families, regardless of home environment or internet access, could learn about nutrition while sharing in the culture and community of food.

We understand that a few virtual cooking classes alone will not decrease obesity rates, yet found it powerful to leverage our school community to promote novel nutrition education that prioritized culture and community. In addition to the Cook With Me events, we were able to cultivate student voices by supervising their creation of a nutrition-themed spirit week through our ‘Spirit’ after-school club and empower teachers to discuss food by providing them with vegetable seeds to plant in the classroom.

Our first Community Chef, Thandiwe Jennifer Lyons of Onyxx Village Connection, celebrates after a successful online event full of dancing, love, and sautéed okra.

Nutrition education cannot operate in a vacuum. It is vital to understand how barriers to nutrition such as food insecurity or household income can complicate individuals’ ability to eat healthy and create barriers to behavior change (such as a lack of experience preparing a certain type of cuisine or access to necessary appliances). However, expanding into community-based education allowed us the opportunity to move away from prescriptive educational approaches and build off individual knowledge to educate ourselves as a cohesive school community. As one Mom reflected: “My family and I try to eat healthy but as a mom I need more healthy recipes. Thank you for helping us eat healthy.”

Our “Cook With Me” series serves as a powerful reminder that we can start small to teach proper nutrition – and we can do it within our own communities. When we work with families to find simple, culturally appropriate recipes and find community members who are willing to demonstrate how to prepare them, we can even bring the joy of cooking back to the table!

Footnotes

  1. 2021 Food Security Index by Conduent Healthy Communities Institute (San Mateo County Health, 2021). Data is based on the 94303 zip code for East Palo Alto.

  2. Research Brief: Food Insecurity and Distribution In Silicon Valley Amid the Pandemic (Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies, Second Harvest of Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley Food Recovery, Sept. 2020).

  3. Relationship between Food Insecurity, Child Weight Status, and Parent-Reported Child Eating and Snacking Behaviors (Journal for Specialists in Pediatric Nursing, Mar. 2017). Study data is based on questionnaires completed by fifty mothers of eight to ten year old children. Food insecurity refers to a “limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways.”

  4. Longitudinal Trends in Body Mass Index Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic Among Persons Aged 2–19 Years — United States, 2018–2020 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Sept. 2021). Study data is sourced from the IQVIA’s Ambulatory Electronic Medical Records database and includes BMI data from 432,302 individuals.


  5. Guidelines for Childhood Obesity Prevention Programs (Academy for Eating Disorders, n.d.).


 
The Primary SchoolNews