We train educators, enrichment specialists, parents, and volunteers to run participatory cooking classes and food literacy initiatives that are essential in their neighborhoods.
Master Cooks Corps Guiding Principles
- The best way to master a skill is to practice it. You learn to cook by doing it. Our approach to teaching cooking is always interactive and participatory.
- As community educators, we think it’s crucial to encourage students’ imagination and improvisatory skills in the kitchen.
- In our opinion, everyone has valuable food-related expertise to impart, value, and honor.
- Food is a reflection of the earth and its cycles, thus we think it’s important to recognize our place in those cycles and interactively teach from seed to waste.
- Food is a reflection of the earth and its cycles, thus we think it’s important to recognize our place in those cycles and interactively teach from seed to waste.
- We think it’s important to foster local leadership since the people living in a given area are the best judges of what their community needs.
- For us, being genuine, authentic, and culturally affirming is the most important quality.
- When people from different backgrounds get together over a meal, it fosters an atmosphere conducive to personal growth and development, as well as the kind of cooperation necessary to advance as a species.
- Equity, in our view, can only be achieved when communities exercise self-determination in establishing their own systems of leadership and equality.
- We are firm believers in the value of a diverse and open community empowerment and engagement.
- Having fun, making joyful cooking occasions, and commemorating culturally significant food history are all highly valued by us.
- MCC (the goal of MCC is to provide a space for people to come together over meals and work for health literacy, systemic change, thus improving the health and equality of their communities with an end goal of food justice and sovereignty.)
Cooking Teachers, Nutritionists, Wellness Facilitators, Dietitians
Instead of the traditional framework of organizations hosting expensive third-party providers to conduct workshops, Master Cooks Corps trains local leaders to deliver an interactive hands-on curriculum in their schools, camps, churches or community centers through the lens of unique food culture. Cooking programs are effective at improving food-related preferences, attitudes, and behaviors among adolescents and adults, when people understand where their students are coming from.
Doctors, Nurses, & Health Care Professionals
Innovative programs are starting to link preventative medicine, healthcare and healthy eating along with culinary education. Health professionals who are trained to empower their patients by knowing how to talk to them about their nutritional health and ways to improve it through diet can give patients practical advice—even recipes—to help meet diet and nutrition goals, rather than relying solely on clinical knowledge (or, most commonly, little nutrition knowledge at all).
Helping Professionals, Community Leaders, Parents
You can produce classes exponentially by training your in house talent. By training organizations’ leaders to deliver the curriculum, you build capacity within organizations that are already reaching vulnerable communities and add value to the comprehensive work already being done requiring minimal resources. This sustainable approach targets and collaborates with organizations that want health education but don’t have the resources to hire outside trainers to come in and lead continual programming.
We have a varied curriculum and program philosophy that is designed for medical students, practitioners, and the general public. MCC is the center of a nutrition education network that spreads outward via medical institutions, community organizations, and the general public.
1
Cultural Relevant
Culinary Instruction
The notion of culturally responsive education is premised on the idea that culture is central to student learning. According to Gloria Ladson−Billings, ” It is an approach that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, artistcally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge,
skills and attitudes.” The use of cultural referents in teaching bridges and explains the mainstream culture, while valuing and recognizing the students’ own cultures. If we want to create change in behavior, understanding someone’s cultural ties to food is important. In teaching cooking and wellness it is imporatant to look at culture in a variety of perspectives that impact food decisions and how to approach culinary instruction to impact the students you are teaching .
2
The Pedagogy of
Cooking
Culinary instruction is more than just a recipe or basic cooking technique, with a teaching philosophy that is based on the educational benefits of cooking as a catalyst to teach many themes and concepts beyond food. Cooking is a multi-dimensional learning possibility and opportunity. Food education is designed to inspire people to learn and express themselves creatively in the kitchen classroom and the kitchen at home while reinforcing traditional learning disciplines. With this in mind, classes incorporate a wide range of subjects: history, geography, math, reading, social studies, nutrition, wellness, science, foreign language, culture, and art all find a place in the kitchen.
3
Experiential
Teaching
Hands-on culinary nutrition outreach programs focused on producing sustainable healthy eating behavior through culinary confidence and nutrition alertness are a successful approach to begin the restoration of our nation’s health. Experiential education is a philosophy that informs many methodologies in which educators purposefully engage with learners in direct experience and focused reflection in order to increase knowledge, develop skills, clarify values, and develop people’s capacity to contribute to their communities. Cooking and all that is related to food like gardening are inherently hands – on based on observation and experience.
Learning to cook elevated humans from lone animals into increasingly intelligent, civilized groups, and though we spend scant time doing real cooking, we’ve become obsessed with watching people cook -a paradox that points to longing for a lost experience.
- Michael Pollan
(Heritage food) brings together everything we’ve developed a passion for: sustainability, farm to table, eating local and thinking global. It’s the kind of food you once could expect to eat only in someone’s home.
- JJ Johnson
Schools, faith communities, hospitals, and organizations can be instrumental in growing fresh food and educating people about sustainable food.
- Bryant Terry
Everyone can cook. If you try. If you put a little love into it.
Why Master Cooks Corps
The practice of cooking was once lauded as the quintessential avenue with which to teach students everything from physics and math to chemistry and biology, to geography and art. The legacy of war, feminist backlash, a burgeoning industrialized food system, and the rise of convenience foods pushed the study of food and cooking out of our schools and our kitchens. Only one-third of the population knows how to cook and more than half of our food dollars are spent on other people preparing our meals. The deskilling of our cooks can be tied to the increase in obesity and diet-related disease, degradation of local food communities, suspect working conditions for food workers, and environmental instability.
Every crisis, actual or impending, needs to be viewed as an opportunity to bring about profound changes in our society. Going beyond protest organizing, visionary organizing begins by creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing system.- Grace Lee Boggs
Eating and its related practices (producing, preparing, etc.) represent so much more than simply a means to nourish the body. As we have heard universally, “we are what we eat”, what we eat does matter and we need to take this matter into our own hands by educating people about the reality of food production in our country. Inspired by the belief in the importance of food edification and cooking techniques, the Master Cooks Corps curriculum and pedagogical methodologies were designed with hopes that the food education movement will gain traction and spread throughout American households via institutions like school, church, hospitals, libraries and other organizations that can support a Master Cooks Corps cohort and program.
Master Cooks Corps Foundations
Food Sovereignty
Cultivated through Passion
We believe that the food we eat is the most important factor in achieving and maintaining health and we fight tirelessly to elevate it to the forefront of the health and wellness conversation. We’re here to decolonize diets, affirm cultural foods, and empower communities to nourish themselves.
Experiential
Nurtured by Learning by Doing
Our modern training methods encourage students to learn by doing, passing on what they know, and practicing what they have learned. This hands-on approach demonstrates that anybody can prepare meals and tend to a garden with encouragement and effective guidance.
Holistic
Nurtured by Teamwork
Our interdisciplinary, experiential, seed-to-plate pedagogical, and culturally affirming framework contributes to filling the void in nutrition education and fostering cross-professional collaboration.
Validated
Nature's through Evidence
Current research and cutting-edge scientific knowledge guide our dedication to unconventional solutions and meticulous, evidence-based programming.
Health Giving & Thriving Cultural Affirming & Decolonizing the Diet
Our curriculum promotes a rainbow diet, Blue zones teachings on eating for longevity, cultural heritage diet pyramids, and a soul (seasonal, organic, unprocessed, local) approach to cooking and meal planning. Our knowledgeable instructors rely on centuries of these combined methodologies to empower clients to eat to live.
Scrumptious
Nurtured through Delight
Because food is so intrinsically connected to one’s identity, we can’t make progress in the field of nutrition unless we recognize the importance of individual preference, history, and heritage. We’ve shown that wholesome food can and should also be delicious while being culturally relevant.
Approachable
Developed through empathy
We showcase low-cost, easy-to-implement methods that anybody can utilize, and we place an emphasis on practical guidance and terminology that can be used to apply the principles of nutrition science in real-world settings.
Regenerative
Cultivating Equilibrium
To ease people into a healthy lifestyle change, we emphasize baby steps and wise substitutions. The way we treat food, the systems that provide it, and the planet around us are all things we work to improve through time.