When you think about who cooks your food, how often is it your responsibility? Are you a large part of the cooking process, or have no knowledge of it at all? Cooking is a large part of life, especially for high school students. If you don’t know how to cook, how will you support yourself after you leave home? All these questions a student might ask themselves has one answer: taking a culinary class. Having basic culinary skills not only allows you to fend for yourself but also teaches proper education on how to fuel your body.
As we get closer to graduating, learning these basic skills becomes an area of focus before we move on in life. Think about all the things your parents or caretaker does for you. By taking a culinary class, learning to properly cook is one less thing you have to worry about before leaving home. High school can be an extremely stressful time in our lives, especially for juniors and seniors as we worry about what might come next. It is important that schools teach us how to cook meals that are not only able to keep us full, but also provide us with the proper food groups to support our physical health. This also allows us to feel a sense of accomplishment each time to successfully complete a recipe as we are able to consume the dish right after, like a reward for completing our task. Culinary is also important because as seniors graduate and move out, our parents won’t be able to cook for us and we are forced to learn how to fulfill our hunger. Becoming a part of the ‘real world’ is already scary enough, having a class dedicated to this one important life skill helps take the pressure off of graduating seniors as we are already prepared to be self-sufficient before we move on to the next chapter.
How many times have you been hungry during class or an after school activity? Taking a culinary class would allow us as students to have the core foundations to craft meals to support our minds and bodies during and after school. Having an emphasis on cooking energizing meals in school and how the ingredients contribute to the human body allows us to break the taboo around eating and can aid in healthy eating habitats of students. Either we choose to eat quick but nutritionally empty snacks, or food becomes scary and causes us not to eat enough to support our body and brain. Implementing education beyond simply cooking meals would give us the resources we need to truly understand how we are affected by what we eat. In turn, this would help us cook and eat better outside of the classroom, but also allow us to feel less scared towards food and break the stigma we create around eating.
