Attitudes and beliefs about how chefs can promote nutrition and sustainable food systems among students at a US culinary school

Objective: Chefs have the potential to influence diet quality and food systems sustainability through their work. We aimed to assess the attitudes and perceptions of culinary students about nutrition and sustainability as part of their roles, responsibilities and future work as chefs. Design: We surveyed students attending the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in the fall of 2019 (n 546). Descriptive statistics compared food priority rankings and Likert-scale distributions of nutrition and sustainability attitudes and beliefs. Adjusted generalized linear models were used to evaluate whether there were differences in attitudes and beliefs across demographic groups. Setting: The Culinary Institute of America, a private, not-for-profit college and culinary school with US campuses in New York, California, and Texas. Subjects: Students ≥18 years old currently enrolled in any of the school’s associate’s or bachelor’s degree programs. Results: Students agreed that chefs should be knowledgeable about nutrition (96.0%) and the environmental impact of their ingredients (90.8%) but fewer considered healthfulness (57.8%) and environmental impact (60.2%) of their food to be primary considerations in their career as a chef. Taste was the primary factor influencing culinary students’ food choices but food priorities differed by race/ethnicity. Conclusions: Culinary students believe nutrition and sustainability are important. Opportunities exist to empower them with knowledge and skills for promoting public health and sustainable food systems in their future work as chefs.

Food Network’s food-career frenzy? An examination of students’ motivations to attend culinary school

This research presents the findings of a year long study, undertaken between 2016 and 2017, seeking to understand the degree to which students are influenced to attend culinary school by food medias, social media, and the Food Network. The notion that food medias draw the majority of new cooks to the industry is often present in popular media discourses, although no data exists seeking to understand this relationship. This study reveals that food medias play a secondary or tertiary role in influencing students to register at culinary school, while also showing previously unknown patterns related to culinary students’ intention to persist with culinary careers. Nearly 40 percent of this sample do not intend to remain cooking professionally for greater than five years, and about 30 percent are “keeping other doors open” upon entry into culinary school. Although food celebrity certainly plays a role in awareness about culinary careers, intrinsic career aspirations are the most frequently reported motivation.

It’s Not All Fried Chicken and Greasy Greens

Mashama Bailey, chef and partner of award-winning restaurant The Grey, recalls first discovering Lewis when searching for a professional chef role model to write about in culinary school. Bailey praises Lewis’s works as perfectly encapsulating everything she loves about southern cooking.

Polished

Joe Yonan—food and dining editor of The Washington Post—remembers his first encounter with Lewis in the pages of The Gift of Southern Cooking. After plentiful culinary school lessons focused on global cuisine, The Gift gave Yonan a newfound respect and understanding for southern cuisine.

Follow That Pig: Visually Charting Enhanced Learning in a Culinary School Butchery Class

Culinary school curricula are composed of courses that present techniques rooted in the classical French cuisine of Escoffier. Students learn by doing; that is, they are presented a technique in a two-dimensional textbook, watch an instructor demonstrate it, and then practice it on their own. This article traces a lesson that enhances this process by asking students to incorporate higher-order concepts into their learning process, and challenge what they know. Through the interactive demonstration of breaking down and processing a whole pig, students were challenged to connect this experience to broader issues in their personal lives, their career goals, and contemporary issues such as reducing food waste. The analysis highlights that when students are engaged in growing the produce they use to learn knife skills, or breaking down the pig they use to make pâté, an enhanced connection exists that benefits the learning environment.

Delineating Cultural Boundaries and Debunking the Myth of the “Classless” Kitchen

This study examines the role cultural capital plays in students’ culinary training. I argue students’ class-dependent cultural capital influenced how they experienced culinary school. I examine how the organization and the standards of culinary school—which draw on aspects of high culture—create barriers for some students. I discuss how students with omnivorous tastes are better equipped to navigate the cultural capital dominant in culinary schools. Prior understanding of omnivorous tastes helps students, as they learn about the culinary field, but given the unequal distribution of the students’ economic capital, not all of the students had equal access to developing such wide range of tastes. This study spans 15 months of ethnographic observations at a culinary arts school in an urban Midwestern city, where I observed students’ interactions in kitchen classrooms and culinary competitions. In-depth interviews were conducted with 50 students and 10 chef instructors. The findings indicate that some students’ class backgrounds limit their opportunities for informal learning and socialization. I found that socioeconomic status, race, and geographical region influenced the students’ cultural capital and their ability to participate in kitchen culture.

Notes from the ‘Insects in a gastronomic context’ workshop in Bangkok, Thailand

Amidst the growing interest in edible insects, most insect dishes featured on menus or during public events are still primarily focused on fried, freeze dried or pulverised insects. This can be attributed to a limited understanding and knowledge of the complexity and variation in unique sensory profiles of insects, as well as how they can be processed. In order to bridge this knowledge gap, Le Cordon Bleu Dusit Culinary School hosted a free, public workshop on ‘Insects in a gastronomic context’ in Bangkok, Thailand on 19 February 2015. The event took its point of departure in focusing on the growing body of scientific and practical knowledge of the field. Four unique dishes were created for the event and participants were invited to evaluate them. Event participation included that of chefs, practitioners, entrepreneurs and scientists. This paper recounts the events leading up to the workshop, as well as the sensory evaluation of the dishes. After the presentation, 93% of the participants noted that they would like to eat insects again. All participants found the menu and complementary presentations interesting, and requests for future workshops and knowledge sharing were made.