The Flavors That Connect Us

November and December are busy months in our kitchen. In the space of six weeks, we celebrate Diwali, Chanukah and Christmas, sometimes without stopping for breath. And in our family, celebrating means cooking!

As a child, I remember waiting impatiently for the samosas and sweet meats that my mother would make on Diwali. The smell of tiny oil lamps being lit still mingles in my memory with the scent of freshly crushed cardamom and the swishing silk of the saris that were worn on that special day. After marrying my dad, my mother learned to make German Christmas cookies and Marzipanstollen as a way of recreating his childhood memories. But something else happened too. By replicating the ceremonial foods of two very different childhoods, she ended up passing both traditions on to us. The holiday specialties she cooked weren’t exact replicas of the original, but they became authentic for us. Like a family scrapbook, the collection of familiar goodies that graced our table, at about the same time each year, helped record and pass on the story of our family.

My boys making sufganiyot (jelly donuts) for Chanukah.

When I married a Jewish South African, I learned how to make latkes and sufganiyot (jelly donuts) and our list of “soul foods” expanded yet again. The range of our holiday specialties grew slowly over the years as I learned to make things like matza ball soup and warm loaves of challah to celebrate the end of each workweek. Sometimes I learned to make things because I had to: making tasty gluten free challah after one of our children was diagnosed with Celiac Disease was a try-and-try-again project. But we’ve got it down pat now, and that bread will live on as the “authentic” challah of our children’s Friday night memories.

Different families have different ways of passing on traditions. Some involve attending services or religious studies. I have an uncle who meticulously updates a family tree that goes back five generations. These are all wonderful ways of letting our children know where they come from, that they are connected to others and that they are loved. Cooking and eating together can do the same.

Imagine if we could teach our children to enjoy the foods of many different world cultures? Even if that was their only connection to otherwise unfamiliar traditions, could it make them more accepting of the unknown? They say that “humanizing” the unfamiliar can make us more open-minded and compassionate. What better way to feel connected to our fellow human beings than by sharing traditions through food?

Loving The Foods That Love Us Back

Interesting fact: the average American sees about 3,000 ads every day.  And a few weeks ago, I had an epiphany while watching ad number 229. It was a commercial for a popular antacid where a mother at a birthday party was trying (unsuccessfully) to take a bite out of a heavily loaded burger. Why was she struggling? The burger was trying to bite her back! The ad is part of a TUMS ad campaign where heavily processed food slaps, punches and attacks the eater. The slogan is pretty clever: “Your favorite food fighting you? Fight back fast with TUMS.”

But then it hit me in the face that something was terribly wrong with the whole message. In medical school, they had taught us that pain was a protective sensation – it was supposed to help people avoid things that might cause them serious bodily harm. If the food that we eat causes us physical pain on a regular basis, then maybe the answer is NOT to neutralize that pain with a medication. Maybe the answer is to eat foods that love us back.


There was a time when we were intimately connected to our food and it’s origins. The food we chose to feed our families protected and sustained us. Over the past 30 years, slowly but surely, the relationship has turned toxic. We’ve woken up in the 21st Century and found ourselves in an abusive relationship with a corndog.

A few years ago, I had dinner with a mother who had recently moved to the US from Mainland China. She had cooked a simple, fragrant meal with finely minced ginger and plenty of vegetables. While we chatted over a glass of wine in the kitchen, she said something that made run in search if a piece of paper and a pen. “Chinese people have a very different relationship with food than Americans,” she said. “In China, we love food. It’s a big part of everyday and an even bigger part of every celebration. Here in America, people seem to think: ‘Food is bad. Food will make me fat.’”

As a huge variety of processed food has found its way onto the supermarket shelves, companies have had to make their products increasingly appealing in order to stay competitive in a tough marketplace. They’ve done this, largely, by exploiting our preferences for foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt. The irony is that the foods that once helped us survive and fend off starvation have become the same foods that could end up killing us.

Is it any wonder then that we’re at war with our food? With the rise of the obesity epidemic and the increasing anonymity of industrial food production, we’ve come to see eating as a combat sport. In a land where French fries and Buffalo wings lurk on every street corner, far too many Americans feel that food is lying in wait for them – ready to attack at the slightest lapse of willpower. Because we are biologically programmed to over-consume high calorie foods when they’re available, we end up fighting a losing battle.

Americans and their food are in need of some good couple’s counseling. Someone needs to hit the reset button. And where better to do this than our very own kitchens. Around the stove and the kitchen table, we can re-kindle the love, the symbiosis and the good health of our honeymoon days with food. All we need is a handful of confidence, a few glugs of courage and a pinch of creativity. So dust off your sense of humor, pull out some fresh ingredients, and let’s get cooking.

Regaining Control Over The Foods We Eat -- "Just Cook For Kids"

One out of every three Americans is suffering from a life-threatening, yet completely preventable disease. What if you could protect your family from this disease and add value to your life with one simple activity? (Hint: you can.) The answer is Cooking. 

Just Cook For Kids is making simple cooking instruction and basic nutrition education widely available, and free of charge, to anyone with an internet connection.

Our first massive open online course, Stanford Child Nutrition and Cooking, caught the attention of more than 34,000 people – and we’re just getting started. You can check out our Just Cook For Kids videos on ourYoutube channel and visit us on Grokker, the Expert Video Network. Come join the amazing community around our table.

The problem:

In a country that has achieved some of the greatest medical advances in history, our own children are potentially facing a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

Possible explanations:

Our children are in trouble because we’ve outsourced the job of feeding them. As processed food companies have made it increasingly easy for parents to avoid the kitchen altogether, we’ve become convinced that we don’t have the time, money or skills to feed our own offspring. Cooking has become a tour de force, not to be attempted at home by amateurs. School lunch programs that offer mostly processed meals reinforce these food choices as appropriate ones in the eyes of our children. And the increasingly sedentary nature of childhood in America confounds this alarming crisis.

Exploring solutions:

While the origins of the problem may be complex, the solution doesn’t have to be. America needs to start cooking again. When we cook at home, we regain control over the foods our families eat. 

If we can reallocate a small amount of time and money towards simple, home cooking, we find ourselves with a powerful tool in the fight against childhood obesity. If we cook at home, we tend to eat less processed food and our children stay healthier.

Besides, home cooking is fun. It can add value to our lives and create more space for community. Spending a bit more time in the kitchen and around the dinner table usually means that we’ll spend a bit more time talking and connecting with our children. Friends will be drawn into our homes as food becomes an integral part of our hospitality. It’s likely that we’ll eat more slowly, consume fewer calories and almost certainly enjoy our food more than we did before we started cooking.

Solutions that work in the long-term have to be easy to implement – for all of us. No amount of lecturing and well-intentioned finger-wagging rivals the power of an individual who decides to fundamentally change their family’s culture of eating. Many of us are aware that our family’s food habits are less than ideal, but the process of turning the cruise ship around seems almost more daunting than the iceberg that lies ahead. The key, then, is to provide families with some basic strategies for success. That’s where we come in.

You have the right to enjoy everything that you eat… and eat the things that you enjoy, while supporting your good health. Real food, eaten in moderation, with others, can help maintain these fundamental rights. So, be fearless. Reallocate resources. Just Cook. Live. Enjoy.

The next Just Cook For Kids course on Coursera is on January 13th, 2014.

About the Author: Maya Adam is a medical doctor who teaches courses on child health and nutrition at Stanford University. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Just Cook for Kids, a non-profit organization trying to inspire a return to simple, economical home cooking for families everywhere. As a mother of three young children, she is also proud to be the family cook and chief party planner.

Stay in touch! Recipes, news, and future course announcements:
Website: www.justcookforkids.com
Twitter: @MayaAdamMD 
Facebook: Just Cook For Kids 
Google+: Child Nutrition and Cooking Community
Youtube: Just Cook For Kids Channel

Originally posted on the Jamie Oliver Food Revolution Blog on September 19, 2013. 

Harnessing the power of online education in the fight against childhood obesity

It’s not yet 7am on any given weekday morning this past year. I’m peering in to a pot of hot cereal, trying to think of creative ways to add more fiber to a child’s gluten free diet. Our days are usually in full swing by 6:15. The lunches are packed and I’m searching for a package of chia seeds, that I’m sure must be there somewhere…

As I remind my eight year old, for the 20th time, to put on his socks and shoes, I’m running through the revisions I’d like to make for the next iterations of the two child nutrition classes I offered this past year. Both classes were the fruits of a 2012 Faculty Seed Grant from Stanford’s Vice Provost for Online Learning. Both were eye-opening and invigorating experiences for me.

The first of these courses, was an on-campus blended learning experiment called Introduction to Child Nutrition, which was offered as an Introductory Seminar to Sophomore students in the Winter of 2013. Students spent 90 minutes each week learning about nutrition science in a “flipped classroom” setting and a further 90 minutes each week actually practicing how to cook healthy, balanced meals in Stanford’s Arrillaga Family Dining Commons. Pre-recorded video modules prepared students for both the nutrition science sessions and the hands-on cooking sessions and students reported: “the use of online mini lectures [was] amazing. It is infinitely more engaging than reading from a textbook.” Another student: “loved the video lectures, which were great supplementary material. Cooking videos were also superb. I loved the use of multimedia in this class, as it definitely engaged us 21st century kids.” You can view a short documentary about the blended Introduction to Child Nutrition here.

Having successfully piloted the course at Stanford, the Child Nutrition and Cooking MOOC slowly came into sight. The course was 5 weeks long and aimed at addressing childhood obesity by inspiring a return to simple, home cooking (and providing some very basic nutrition education to support it.) We knew our audience would be diverse, both in terms of their levels of education and their comfort level with the English language. We also knew that many of them would be busy parents, and if we wanted to help them make any waves at all, we would have to be careful to keep them in the water. Delivered through Coursera to students from more than 60 countries around the world, the class was a huge learning curve for me.

I lay awake at night planning… Healthy recipe ideas turned into ideas for how to simplify the language of basic nutrition for an incredibly diverse student population. The first priority: not to lose the people we most wanted to reach by keeping the language simple. Then there were other questions – like how to maximize student participation in a class with 29,859 students enrolled on the final day of class – and since then, enrollment has exceeded 34,000. In the end, 7804 students received a certificate of completion for the course, with 6056 of those students completing the course with distinction. That’s a completion rate of just over 26%. And just over 2,700 students joined the Child Health and Nutrition – Just Cook Google Plus group that is still active today. But what’s even more exciting (for me, at least) is that the preliminary data suggests we might have been able to do some good.

Our best indicators showed that after completing the course:

• Students who ate fruit daily increased by one third.
• Students who ate vegetables daily increased from half to almost two thirds.
• Students who prepared lunches and dinners at home increased from half to nearly two thirds.

The percentage of students who cooked dinner, lunch, and breakfast (top to bottom) daily, as reported in the pre- and post-course surveys

Of course, we expect there to be a certain amount of bias here. It’s likely that the few thousand people who actually filled out both pre and post surveys represent a more highly motivated group. But if there’s even a chance that we’re heading in the right direction with this, we can’t quit now. The next iteration of the course (the one I now find myself lying awake imagining) will integrate basic nutrition education “inkings” with quizzes, hands-on, video demonstrations and peer-assessed home cooking assignments for the students. It will be a course in which even the non-scientist can put into practice the science of healthy food preparation.

My first experiment with MOOCing can be characterized as more of a public health message than an academically challenging course. It was aimed at parents from all walks of life who are struggling to decipher a slew of contradictory nutritional messages. The primary goal of the course was to help parents teach their children to enjoy reasonable amounts of healthy, homemade foods in an attempt to prevent and address childhood obesity, by reducing processed food consumption. I suspect that I learned more than anyone. Not only did I learn some survival skills for managing so many students and making health information more accessible to the general public, but perhaps even more profound, were the lessons I learned from the combined wisdom of an amazingly diverse group of students, each with something to bring to the table.

My personal take-home message: the power of these new teaching opportunities is staggering, for students and teachers. We really do have a way to reach out and shape the world around us for the better (while allowing ourselves to be shaped by the communities we reach.) At the same time, we can use these new tools to enrich the in-class experiences for our students and ourselves. The magic of face-to-face interactions with highly skilled professors doesn’t need to get lost in the process. In many ways, these technological advances can liberate them – allowing them to be even better teachers. My hope is to increase the breadth and depth of my teaching by harnessing the power of online learning. If I can change the world around me for the better (however subtly), by using these tools, I suspect that I’ll sleep well at night! 

Selected comments from the MOOC students:

“I loved the course! And I learned a lot. Maya is intelligent, caring, and down to earth, and I liked that she involved her kids in the cooking demos and that they took place in her own kitchen, because it made us easily relate to her. Her demos were clear and understandable. I also enjoyed the optional readings.”

“I loved it! The instructor was very nice, intelligent and made me feel like I could do it. Cooking has always been a bit intimidating but I learned it doesn’t have to be….just cook!  Thanks Maya for all the work you put into this..I wish they would teach this in school!”

“This was absolutely PHENOMENAL! I am seriously considering a career change toward nutrition, and Maya was nothing short of fantastic. PLEASE hold another course!!!”

“I sent a happy kid to bed… all his meals today were made from scratch. he had all the vitamins, proteins and carbs he needs and he loved everything! thanks Maya.”

Originally posted on Stanford University's blog "SIGNAL: Thoughts on Online Learning" on August 29, 2013. 

Remember, back in the 80’s, when America went “fat-free”? Research at the time was suggesting that the saturated fats in our diet were a major cause of heart disease, so suddenly all sources of dietary fat became Public Enemy No. 1. The packaging of yogurts and cookies and thousands of other processed foods proudly shouted out their claims of “reduced fat”, “low fat” and “fat-free”. They didn’t mention the sugar that was being added, in enormous quantities, to make up for the “mouth-feel” that was lost along with the fat. Instead, the messaging was kept simple: Fat is bad. Cut it out. Nothing else matters.

So Americans (and our children) continued to consume too many high-calorie, processed foods and rates of obesity and Type 2 Diabetes skyrocketed. Today, we are figuring out that the large amounts of sugar added to packaged foods, like cereals and sodas, are just as bad (if not worse) for our children’s health than the fats they replaced. And unfortunately, the processed food giants are now adding both, along with added sodium, in excessive quantities. This is all part of the “Big Food” industry’s master plan to make brand-loyal consumers out of our unsuspecting offspring by the time they can see over the countertop.

It seems to me that the solution lies in a good counter-marketing campaign. The parents of America may not have 1.7 Billion dollars to spend every year marketing the good stuff to our children, but our unfettered access to the consumer would make any advertising executive drool. We see our kids every day - sometimes for hours on end - and for the most part, they listen to us… even if they don’t always agree! So, what should our jingle be? Enjoy real food, in moderation. 

When it comes to feeding the next generation, we have a unique opportunity to teach them a love of the wonderful flavors that only whole, natural foods can offer. I’m not advocating a diet of lettuce leaves and raw broccoli. Our home-cooked meals can be deliciously flavored with fresh herbs, fragrant spices and, YES, small, reasonable amounts of salt, sugar and even butter! Certainly, the average American child’s diet tends to be too high in fat, sugar and salt. (If you've managed to eliminate salt and sugar completely from your child's diet, that's commendable.) But in the great majority of cases, the excess of fat, sugar and salt that's plaguing our Nation comes from processed food. If the parents of America try to compete with those foods by offering our children home-cooked meals that are flavorless and unappealing… guess what, folks? We're going to lose.

So, let’s collectively defy our history of extremism by finding a solution that lies somewhere in the middle. It's okay to use small, reasonable amounts of the stuff we’ve historically feared, like (natural) fats, a pinch of sugar and a dash of salt, together with plenty of fresh herbs, lemon juice and other healthful spices to make our home-cooked meals delicious. In this way, we can really teach our children how to eat well and stay healthy. And in America today, this rare and precious ability – knowing how to enjoy good things in moderation - could end up saving their lives.

Just cook.

I have spent the last ten years exploring a simple solution to a complex problem. I’m not sure I have the perfect solution either, but I’ve come to believe that perfection is overrated. The problem is the food environment in which our three children are growing up. We live in the United States, but this kind of food environment and the problems associated with it are spreading steadily to other parts of the world, even as I write.  The solution I’ll propose may disappoint you at first. It’s surprisingly low-tech and I can’t even call it mine. It belongs to my mother and my big sister, who taught me everything I know about simple home cooking. And, in some ways, it belongs to every parent who ever passed on a family recipe to the next generation. Little did they know, that food-splattered index card might hold some of the secrets of their family’s long-term health and happiness.

Am I being too dramatic? Maybe. But the truth is that eating in America is becoming a question of survival. Not survival as it was in the old days, when people were fighting for every scrap and every calorie (sadly, many people in the world still are) but in the US, the epidemic of childhood obesity threatens to leave our children with a shorter life expectancy than their parents. Survival, for them, now means having the sheer strength to go against the unrelenting messages being delivered to their 5 senses via fast foods tailored to addict and ubiquitous food marketing, designed to make them consume.

There’s no doubt that this problem is complex, but the solution doesn’t have to be. Here it is: Just cook. If you have a kitchen, no matter how small, and if you have access to a source of fresh foods, you’re in business. We have come to see cooking as a series of dangerous and complicated stunts – acts that should not be attempted at home and ones that should only be performed by trained professionals. We have come to see cooking as a luxury activity that demands significant time, money and preparation.

My grandmother never learned how to drive a car and certainly never attended culinary school, but she could roll out a dozen perfectly round rotis (Indian flat breads) with her eyes closed.  She learned to cook because the kitchen was her workshop, her artist’s studio and her temple all rolled into one. Kitchens were where food came from in those days and in her kitchen, she was the Queen.  My grandmother had no professional training but, like many grandmothers, her meals are talked about and celebrated generations later. They represent all of the love and care she passed on to her children and to theirs. And because of that love, they were inherently healthy.

When we cook for our families, we have control over the ingredients we’re using and ultimately, over the nutrients that are supporting our family’s health. Even if we’re just beginning on this journey back to the kitchen (back to a healthy, gratifying and celebratory way of eating) we are on our way to a sustainable solution. Just cook, especially if you have kids. Just. Cook.