Do You Know How to Cook?

If you are interested in eating a healthy diet and if you are reading newspapers and magazine articles and watching TV you’ve heard that home cooked food is healthier, less fattening and provides the added benefit of a time for members of the household to sit down together to eat and to catch up with one another.

But there’s a problem with this approach.  Over the past 30 years or so the number of two career couples has risen dramatically.  This means that both are at their workplace for a typical 8 hour day plus time to get to work and get back home.  Energy is low, time is short, and then there’s the big problem:  lots of people of all education levels, incomes high and low, family backgrounds of all types, have never learned to cook. 

We’re not talking gourmet fare here, just a protein dish, some vegetables, a starch or a salad.  Oh, and preferably they all are ready to eat at the same time.  Seems simple enough, but maybe it isn’t.

Many of us have never learned to cook.  My mother wanted no one else in her kitchen.  I had to figure it out on my own.  Many of us went from home to school to work and living away from home and just never took the time to learn.   Fast food was cheap and easy.  Many went to work in their teens and kept on working.  Learning to cook just didn’t happen.

Certainly anyone can learn to cook a basic meal.  Stores give recipes away, the Internet has an endless supply of recipes, classes are available at lots of places.   Experience and confidence help a lot and those come with repeating the effort to make a meal.

If you are committed to eating healthier, you pretty much have got to learn to cook.  What time is dinner?

If you grow it, they may not come . . .

When I began working in the voluntary food assistance arena I was surprised that people who are hungry would not eat certain foods.  I thought that if someone was truly hungry, they would eat anything. 

While it is true that someone is who clinically starving will eat just about anything, including non-foods, in order to fill their stomach and quiet their hunger, most of those who are hungry in our country are not at that level of hunger.  And no one should have to be starving to receive food assistance.

What we eat is a cultural norm that varies from family to family and from region to region.  If you grew up on a meat (here meaning beef), a starch and two vegetables washed down with a glass of whole milk you might find a piece of fish, a salad and a little bit of pasta with a glass of water not to your liking.  If your family always had freshly baked bread at every meal, you might think that a loaf of plain white bread was not very appealing.  If you’ve never eaten bagels and lox for breakfast, they might be a tough sell.

I met with a man the other day who is growing vegetables to give to the hungry.  He said, “We’re not growing radishes.  People don’t really like radishes that much.  We are growing things that people will eat like tomatoes, squash, beans, and peas.”  Now this makes perfect sense to me. 

It is easy to assume that we know what people “should” eat.   Let’s be honest and admit that adults are able to make choices about what they like and what they don’t.   Making a range of quality food available to choose respects the individual and their decisions. 

Graduate or Go Hungry!

It’s high school graduation time and across the Upstate there are proud parents, relieved graduates and smiles all around.  There should be, because the graduates being celebrating have achieved something 25 percent of their fellow classmates have failed to accomplish.  Does that matter?  It should, because the facts don’t lie:

               A high school dropout will earn $9,200 less than a graduate.

               Greenville County high school dropouts are twice as likely to be unemployed.

               High school dropouts in Greenville County are 2.5 times more likely to live in poverty.

               High school graduates live 9.2 years longer than high school dropouts.

So your kids are grown and gone, so you’re single and don’t plan on having kids and you really don’t care?  You should.  Low high school graduation rates cost everyone in our community more money.

High crime rate - High school dropouts are 3.5 times more likely than high school graduates to be arrested and 8 times more likely to be in jail or prison.

Expensive prison system - It costs more than twice as much per year to incarcerate a prisoner in our state ($13,590) and in our county ($17,213) than to educate a student in Greenville County ($6,498).

More expensive government assistance programs - 40 percent of dropouts receive some type of government assistance.

Higher unemployment rates -Studies show when students drop out of high school, their prospects for the future are greatly dimmed without a degree. 

Fewer jobs for uneducated workers - The number of jobs requiring education beyond high school is growing twice as fast as jobs that only require on-the-job training.

What can you do?  Everything from learning more about the problem to getting involved with a school tutoring program, a mentoring organization, speaking at a school career fair, and talking sincerely with the children you know about what they want to do when they grow up and what it will take to reach their goals.   Keep encouraging those kids at every step along the way.  Caring about a child’s future will pay big benefits for the child and for our community.