Chef Eduardo, host of Magnolia Network's “Big Sky Kitchen,” works with students during a cooking clinic at Sherman Oaks Enriched Studies Center in Tarzana on Tuesday, April 23, 2024.・Mr. Garcia (Photo provided by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Celebrity chef Eduardo Garcia has spent nearly 30 years in the culinary arts, traveling the world as a private chef for some of the world's richest and most powerful people. ”) learned how to cook from the stars. Ingredients for all kinds of recipes.
“The most important factor is care,” Garcia recounted what he told students during a visit to the Los Angeles Unified School District campus on Tuesday, April 23.
The celebrity chef, who also hosts Magnolia Network's “Big Sky Kitchen with Eduardo Garcia,” will participate in an event for Common Thread, a national nonprofit that uses nutrition education to promote healthy eating and community health. I was visiting the city for Mr. Garcia serves on the nonprofit's national board.
Garcia and Common Thread co-founder and CEO Linda Novick O'Keefe traveled from the Sherman Oaks Enrichment Research Center in Tarzana to observe students in the nonprofit's Kitchen Clinic. visited. That day's menu included fish tacos, Spanish rice, coleslaw, and chocolate chip cookie dough hummus.
Kitchen Clinic is a program for high school students to experience cooking and nutrition education. Over the course of 10 weeks, students will try new recipes, learn about the medicinal properties of certain foods, hear from medical professionals ranging from doulas to psychiatrists, cardiologists and gastroenterologists, and explore the relationship between food and overall health. Understand more deeply.
Novick-O'Keefe said, “It's important for kids to be intentional about their choices and to make sure they're really cooking and eating for themselves and their families and making healthy choices. It's great to see them understanding how important it is.”
“Our health impacts are directly related to what we eat and drink,” she said.
Approximately half of the participants will work as assistant chef instructors and co-teach cooking classes to elementary school students as part of a 30-hour paid internship.
One of the goals of the Kitchen Clinic program is to get students thinking about careers in hospitality and health care, where culinary medicine can improve patient outcomes.
More than 150 LAUSD students have participated in the clinic, which began two years ago. Although the program is offered at his four campuses in LAUSD, Novick-O'Keefe said he hopes the program will expand to more campuses in the district.
While Kitchen Clinic is a relatively new program, Novick-O'Keefe said Common Thread, as a nonprofit organization, has been around for 20 years and has partnered with LAUSD on the program for 17 years. Overall, the nonprofit organization provides programs to more than 750 school and community partner sites in 10 major U.S. cities.
Garcia lost his left arm in 2011 when he was electrocuted by a 2,400-volt power line while hunting in the Montana backcountry, and then had to learn how to get around the kitchen with a prosthetic leg, giving him a new perspective on life. It gave me a perspective.
The “Bionic Chef,” who now considers himself a food equity advocate, values the opportunity to inspire and motivate others.
“My role is to put a spark into everything related to food and get[students]to observe it in their own lives… how they feel, how they exist, how they think. , to have them observe how they interact with other people,” he said.
