Illinois

Peoria Non-Profit Uses Cooking Classes To Address Food Insecurity, Community Health

WCBU | By Dana Vollmer

Published February 6, 2020 at 9:44 AM CST

A Peoria non-profit is trying to address food insecurity and community health through education.

Peoria Grown hosts cooking classes at various community centers to introduce fresh ingredients and budget-friendly meal options.

WCBU recently visited a kids class at the Southside Community Center.Listen to the full story.

Twelve kids — as young as seven and all from Peoria’s South Side — circle around a table.

Tonight, they’re learning to make a healthier twist on a classic: pizza.

Instructors hand out colorful plastic knives to chop toppings: mushrooms, green peppers, and for one especially brave volunteer - onions.

Walter loads up his English muffin pizza with mushrooms, peppers and onions. One of the goals of Peoria Grown's cooking classes is to sneak more vegetables into familiar recipes.

They lay out the rest of the toppings and form an assembly line, slathering sauce on a whole wheat English muffin and loading it up with cheese, pepperoni and — hopefully — vegetables.

Tricia Zuercher is a dietitian with OSF HealthCare Systems, which partners with Peoria Grown to teach these classes.

“Doing classes like this, if the kids aren’t very familiar with the foods, they’re less likely to try them,” she said. “So it works better to start with something familiar and add ingredients than introduce something wild and crazy.”

Co-instructor Karen Mischler, another OSF dietitian, said it helps to use an analogy.

“I tell them it’s like learning to ride a bike. You don’t just get on a bike and go, you have to practice. So I tell them trying new foods is like that: you have to practice it and sometimes it takes five, ten times before your tastebuds say ‘Yep, I like this.’”

Participants in Peoria Grown’s cooking classes leave with a bag full of ingredients to recreate the meals at home.

Mischler said that’s a huge step toward encouraging healthy eating at home.

Xavier already helps cook at home, but said he wants to recreate the recipes he learned through Peoria Grown. Students are sent home with a bag of ingredients to do just that.

“The kids can say, ‘Oh, we tried this.’ But if the parents don’t have the recipe or they don’t have the foods and they don’t have the resources for the foods, this just kind of brings it all together so then they can make it at home — for siblings, parents or whoever else, too.”

That’s why Peoria Grown treats food education as a family affair. They offer classes for women, as well as children.

Julia Eliathamby founded the non-profit.

“We also realized that a lot of the families we are trying to serve have health issues,” she said. “That is why all of our classes are taught by dietitians, because we really wanted to connect the families to the subject matter expert, so that they can kind of guide them to make the necessary changes to their meals — small, little changes.”

Eliathamby said the thought of “eating healthy” can be overwhelming for families that are tight on time or cash — or just have a hard time breaking old habits.

“This is when we were like, ‘Okay, we’re going to come and show you two recipes at a time. But it’s very simple recipes, very budget friendly and, a lot of times, things that they’re already used to making, but just giving it a slight different twist, incorporating more healthy options in it.”

She said that approach seems to resonate with participants. Peoria Grown launched a year ago. Since then, class offerings have grown dramatically as more community centers request the program.

“Compared with last year, I think the first quarter we had only six classes,” Eliathamby said. “Right now, for this year for the first quarter, we have already 33 classes signed up."

Peoria Grown is developing a way to measure whether classes help create long-term change to healthier habits. For now, Eliathamby said participants often send positive messages when they apply what they learned or try a new recipe at home.

And she said there’s more to come with the help of volunteers and sponsors.

“We’re definitely always looking for volunteers,” Eliathamby said. “More hands on deck are much needed -- and of course, donations. We would love to have any sponsors.”

For more information on Peoria Grown’s cooking classes and how to get involved with the non-profit, visit their Facebook or Instagram page.

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