Want to Keep Families Together? Teach Kids How to Cook

I'm so proud to announce that a recent study commissioned by The Food Bank of South Jersey (FBSJ) has discovered that its Healthy Living Initiative cooking classes do more than fight obesity and teach good eating habits: they are giving South Jersey's children a secret weapon in the fight for domestic stability – the family dinner table.

Having reached over 6,000 people in three years of hands on, interactive cooking classes and watching obesity rates drop in New Jersey (the results of a recent Center for Disease Control study), the Food Bank of South Jersey asked Rutgers University to explore what their Cooking Matters instructors had been seeing for a while. Children exposed to Cooking Matters classes were taking their newly acquired skills and nutritional knowledge and bringing it home. Compared to control groups, more Cooking Matters families were preparing and eating dinner together.

The results were amazing. Compared to control groups, families exposed to our classes were more likely to cook at home (33% vs. 18%), eat together as a family (67% vs. 27%) and use what they learned in class to guide their nutrition choices when they shopped and cooked (50% vs. 18%) .” 

 A new ten-year study from The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University shows that children who eat meals with their families frequently (five times per week or more) are half as likely to get into unhealthy or illegal behaviors than children who rarely get to sit down and dine with the family. And in urban cities like Camden City, where the problems with drugs, crime and poverty have often stymied attempts to help the city achieve normalcy. 

Certainly investing in infrastructure helps and is important to a city’s stability, but I think that there needs to be some thought on the most primal of social units – the family – the Food Bank is showing that what happens at home is bigger and ultimately better than all of that.