The Future of Culinary Education
There's a new type of chef emerging called a nutritional chef, wellness chef or culinary coach who treats food as medicine to help people with cooking skills and benefit their health. There's some very successful people in this field who are ... The Nutritional Chef etc. they provide services such as one on one coaching online, cookery classes, supermarket tours to teach people healthy food choices. From talkingn to a German chef workingn in America he noticed in the supermarket that people are starting to look at food labels more. Their becoming more concerned about what is actually in their food, what they are consuming and how it could effect their health.
Some of the problems people face are lack of culinary education. I remember when I lived in student accomadation with guys in their 20's and they lived on fast food take away deliveries and used to laught at me been an ex chef that I used to cook everything from scratch. Things changed though one of the guys came into my room one evening with a bowl of potatoes that he had bought and asked me 'How do I cook these?' I was a little shocked that he didn't know how to cook potatoes. I ended up teaching him and his partner some simple recipes and their interest in cooking grew that soon they were cooking nearly every night and fast food take away deliveries were a thing of the past.
Which leads me to another point that I believe culinary education should be part of the school culicrum. A few hours a week learning simple recipes and how to budget for the week. It's an essential life skill that will benefit students later on in life when they go to college get their own place and have to manage their own weekly living expenses.
I've talked to different people about this and the insight has been quite informative. One woman in America told me about her adult children. They complain about the price of fuel for their car going up a few cents but buy expensive convience foods in the supermarket they don't know anything different they have grown up in the era of convience food. Recently I was in one of our local supermarkeets and I was amazed at the extent of convience food they even had pre cooked fried onions! and really expensive. Another person in America told me his doctor recommended that he goes on a low sodium low salt diet but he didn't know where to go for culinary education for this. It's not just health reasons I was talking to a local taxi driver who used to work as a Garda our Irish police force and he said that lack of culinary education can lead to relationship breakdowns and domestic problems.
In the UK it's predicted that more than 42m UK adults will be overweight by 2040 'Being overweight or obese increases the risk of at least 13 different types of cancer and also causes other conditions such as high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. In the UK, an estimated 22,800 cases of cancer are attributed to obesity every year.
Sourch The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/
Jonathan Power Chief Cook The MV Isle of Innishfree, Le Harve, France 2002
There's a big shift now in healthier eating especially plant based diets made popular by online celebrity brands such as Clean Food Dirty Girl, Bosh, The Happy Pear and others. When I trained as a chef we were trained in traditional French cusine which is typically very high in fat. We used to use a lot of cream and butter blocks in soups and sauches etc. but that is changing Board Failte who run the culinary training programs here in Ireland now also have a culinary wellness chef training program which includes advanced modules in nutrition for healthy lifestyles.
Before And After loosing 84 pounds on a plant based diet
As I got a little older I became more aware of the effects of our eating habits on our health and have became interested in culinary medicine. When I choose to give up meat and dairy products and follow a plant based wholefood diet 6 years ago I noticed some of the benefits immediately with better digestion and over the period of about two years I lost approxaitely a third of my body weight 84 pounds with a plant based diet and regular exercise mountain biking here in Donegal Ireland.
One of the early prototypes testinng Foodie Classroom in the supermarket on my iPhone
From watching the technology that brands like Clean Food Dirty Girl were using online to run their meal planner subscription service, Forks Over Knives is another that's how with my experience in website development and digital marketing that I got interested in building Foodie Classroom for food and wellness professionals to market and sell their Zoom classes, events/programs, memberships, meal plans and digital and physical products.
You can see a demo of Foodie Classroom here along with instructional walkthrough videos aboout how it works.
The global cooking class market was valued at US$ 489.18 Mn in 2020 and is anticipated to reach US$ 2317.04 Mn by 2029 growing at a CAGR of 18.9% over the forecast period (2021 – 2029)
Source https://www.absolutemarketsinsights.com/reports/Global-Cooking-Class-Market-2021---2029-820