Learning To Cook Gives Kids Essential Life Skills

If you’re interested in getting Sasha, or Roberto, or Tyler to eat a more diverse, well rounded, more colorful, and therefore healthier diet, cooking is the thing to do.

If mealtimes are fraught and you can’t get Zanefa, Evilee, or Colin to sit still/try new foods/eat fruit/eat green foods, we recommend your children learn to cook (and maybe you too).

If Bobby is struggling with math, or Yasmin is resisting reading, you guessed it: we recommend they learn to cook. At ChopChop Family (chopchopfamily.org), we look at everything through the lens of cooking and believe just about everything can be eased by learning this one skill. In the process of learning to cook, children can also learn essential life skills like relationship and team building, nutrition awareness, and critical school readiness skills including literacy, science, math and geography, among others.

Affordable home cooking with simple ingredients and skills

ChopChop Family is a 12-year-old nonprofit whose mission is to teach kids and their families how to cook, eat, and learn about real, nourishing food. We focus on affordable home cooking using uncomplicated, inexpensive ingredients and teachable skills.

Our James Beard Award-winning quarterly, ChopChop: The Fun Cooking Magazine for Families, is published in both English and Spanish and is at the heart of our work. It’s ad-free (we don’t believe in advertising to kids) and filled with delicious recipes from everywhere in the world, and essential how-tos like how to peel a carrot/apple/potato, how to roast an eggplant/zucchini/butternut squash, how to sauté, and how to use a knife safely, among other important skills.

It’s got lots of STEAM activities, fun food facts, interactive games and gorgeous photographs of kids making and eating good food. The original idea was to have pediatricians distribute the ChopChop publication during well-child visits; kids would learn to cook and take some responsibility for their own health. They would have fun, bond with their parents or caregivers and stop eating so much junk. They would achieve nutritional literacy.

Today, the world has changed. The idea of teaching kids to cook is no longer foreign and in fact, it’s seen as essential. ChopChop can still be found in pediatricians offices, but we are also distributed in Head Start, WIC (Women, Infants, and Children), SNAP, Tribal Communities, departments of health and education, like-minded food brands and supermarkets. We work closely with the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Centers for Disease Control and we do offer subscriptions.

Eatable Alphabet helps preschoolers learn about food

The newest member of our family is Eatable Alphabet, an independent flip-through activity deck for preschoolers. Before we created the deck we offered classes to toddlers and discovered that it was the parents who were resistant to trying new foods, not the kids.

When we taught the Letter F (for fish) every single toddler ate the tuna fish, anchovies (yes anchovies) and sardines. The parents backed away! If parents can put aside their own issues, they can keep their kids busy and learn all sorts of things: early nutrition awareness, sensory experience and literacy across a range of subjects including food, language, math and numbers.

Free newsletter with activities for kids and recipes for caregivers

We also started publishing a free monthly newsletter at the start of the pandemic—one that’s filled with activities for kids, as well as recipes for caregivers looking to stretch their resources, take good care of their families, and turn ingredients into meals. Need help translating a box from your local food pantry into dinner for your family? We’ve got you. Just visit at ChopChopFamily.org.

Happy Cooking!