Part of the SNAP-Ed Strategies & Interventions Toolkit.*
Hands-on cooking and tasting lessons with fresh, affordable foods from diverse cultures. Curricula are available for grades K-6. Educates and empowers children and families to make healthy food choices through hands-on learning with fresh, affordable foods from diverse cultural traditions. The program uses three nutrition education and obesity prevention approaches: direct education, multi-level interventions, and community and public health approaches.
- Evaluated
- Validated
The program was evaluated. Results include: 1) Fruit and vegetable preferences improved significantly more among students receiving "Cooking With Kids" lessons compared with students in schools without ”Cooking With Kids" and 2) Cooking self-efficacy increased most in students who initially reported little cooking experience prior to ”Cooking With Kids" lessons.
Cooking with Kids not only teaches cooking skills, but also educates children on reading, writing, history, literacy, wellness, math, science, and social studies. Each recipe lesson has three separate classroom recipes that can be combined for a complete meal.
* SNAP-Ed Strategies & Interventions: An Obesity Prevention Toolkit for States is a compilation of interventions. The toolkit was developed by USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, The Association of SNAP-Ed Nutrition Education Administrators (ASNNA), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for Training and Research Translation (Center TRT), and the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research (NCCOR), a partnership between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes for Health (NIH), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the USDA. It is designed and updated to help state SNAP-Ed administrative and implementing agencies identify evidence-based obesity prevention programs and policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) strategies and interventions to include in their SNAP-Ed plans.