Master Cooks Corps & Other Training 

 Convenience is killing us. We need a revolution. Cooking real food is a revolutionary act.

— Dr. Mark Hyman, NY Times bestselling author, family physician, and international leader in the field of Functional Medicine.

Master Cooks Corps is a volunteer community – based cooking training service program comprised of the most passionate adult and youth chefs which draw from the diversity of the neighborhoods in which they serve because they are the citizens of those communities.

Master Cooks Corps is active on the front lines of a critical nationwide effort to address our country’s relationship with healthy food, wellness, cooking, and using food as a communal building asset.

Partnering and collaborating with food justice, culinary education, scholastic, medical, and helping organizations to stir up solutions to the nation’s food issues while cooking itself well, makes this work even more enriching and far reaching. Master Cooks Corps seeks to create communities of wellness by increasing knowledge of, engagement with, and access to healthy food.

The Master Cooks Corps curriculum is based on Mark Bittman’s essay “Chop, Fry, Boil: Eating for One or 6 Billion”. Master Cooks Corps members are trained to facilitate teaching about healthy, culturally relevant food, and how to make wholesome food accessible to everyone that is easy to make yet can be prepared on a limited budget.

They learn to meet participants where they are at in terms of their food preferences, skills, knowledge, and resources available in the communities in which they live and serve.

Oldways Heritage Diet Pyramids (Vegetarian, Mediterranean, Latin, African, and Asian) and pedagogical practices that support culturally relevant, sustainable, popular education and experiential teaching also support the curriculum and create a culinary pedagogical toolkit in which to draw from later for Master Cooks Corps Members who teach students from a variety of demographics in a array of settings.

Created to fulfill the overwhelming requests for cooking education, Master Cooks Corps is a scalable solution to the national obesity, diabetes, and preventative disease epidemic.

In America where wealth disparities compound widening health gaps, residents are at elevated risk for chronic diseases and many negative health outcomes when compared to other nations. Master Cooks Corps addresses the root cause of both: lack of culinary education and access to healthy food.

What we do best is equip schools, health professionals, and other community organizations with a set of interactive culinary instruction strategies to meaningfully engage with a variety of constituencies about food, nutrition, and wellness.

These pedagogical practices are easy and fun to implement while very effective in inspiring enhanced food literacy skills with the average person. We want to make healthy, culturally relevant instruction available for communities to create more sustainable and “well” environments through interactive culinary education. See how it can look like in your community or organization here. 

For more information about Master Cooks Corps and other training in interactive culinary education, start a Master Cooks Corps in your community or organization, connect with us here, or learn about the importance of interactive culinary education to empower positive behavior towards overall well-being,  please watch video below to understand the dynamic way in which experiential cooking education can transform lives while satisfying appetites while having fun and increasing nutrition literacy.