Cooking Matters

First piloted in 1993, Cooking Matters offers nutrition and cooking classes to enable low-income families to prepare healthy, affordable meals. Each set of courses has a specific target group, ranging kids, teenagers, young parents, adults, families, and child care professionals. Participants attend a 2 hour class once a week for 6 weeks. During these courses, participants are taught food and kitchen safety, knife skills, and various nutrition lessons such as: healthy breakfast, fruits and vegetables, and whole grains. In addition, participants work with Nutrition and Chef Instructors to cook healthy recipes throughout the course. Cooking Matters is a collaboration between Share Our Strength, which contributes national instructional support, training, evaluation and funding, and local program partners, which provide hands-on resources and relationships. Funding for Cooking Matters comes from donations by individuals and corporate partners.

The goal of Cooking Matters is to empower families by providing them with the skills, knowledge, and confidence to prepare healthy and affordable meals.

Cooking Matters held 1,020 courses, with 11,987 participants and a graduation rate of 86% in 2010. The program evaluated participants with surveys before and after the course. The surveys covered issues in food budgeting, nutrition habits, and food safety, recording attitudes towards statements on a numeric scale, which corresponded to never, seldom, sometimes, most of the time, and always. These responses were averaged out for each course set, and responses were contrasted before and after. Results showed improvements in all behaviors in question.