Save the date: Monday, May 2nd. Benefit with Bill Yosses!

http://www.davidbouley.com/product/mon-may-2-630pm-spring-benefit-w-bill-yosses-kitchen-garden-laboratory-young-chefs-program/

Teaming up with legendary New York chef David Bouley, culinary Advisor Bill Yosses is hosting a benefit for his organization Kitchen Garden Laboratory as well as Young Chefs. The fundraiser will support KGL/ young chefs collaboration in building gardens as science and cooking learning spaces in underserved communities across the U.S

Read more from the official announcement below:

KGL founder, former Bouley and White House pastry chef Bill Yosses, literally baked his way into a food movement that is changing the way young people look at food. His path took him from mentorships in France to leading the lavish dessert departments of the best restaurants in New York City and finally to an eight-year reign in the White House kitchen. He is now the “anti-sugar pastry chef”!

“When a dessert chef says that too much sugar is being used to make desserts, you know there is a problem,” quipped Bill recently.

Bill worked closely with First Lady Michelle Obama to vastly expand the White House’s kitchen garden, launch a bee-keeping program and concentrate on making healthier but ever-delicious desserts. Bill started by replacing butter with fruit puree and sugar with honey and agave and he became an ambassador for Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative.

Kitchen Garden Laboratory has partnered with Vayu Maini Rekdal, a PhD candidate in Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, as well as the curriculum writers and leaders behind the Young Chefs Program (YCP) to create lesson plans that use cooking to teach STEM subjects across the world.

KGL and YCP curriculum programs have been used in a wide array of contexts, from New York City’s Department of Education and Harvard Medical School, to underserved communities in Minnesota and classrooms around the globe. Their innovative, fun lesson plans are in line with the Next Generation Science Standards so they can easily be incorporated into the ongoing education of American schoolchildren.

Bill is an author of three books on food, a James Beard Foundation Award Winner and the creator of the New York Times Travel Show’s Kid’s Kitchen.

An after school program at the Co-op for Arts and Humanities High-School just started its second class of “Cooking as Science” using the Young Chefs’ curriculum! “Celebrating the arts in each of us and in all we do, Cooperative Arts and Humanities is a rigorous arts-focused, college preparatory program that awakens a diverse community of student-artists to their individual powers as creators, thinkers, and leaders for the twenty-first century.” At this high school in New Haven, Connecticut, the Young Chefs Program is used as part of the school’s robust after school programming, in a class led by one of the school’s chemistry teachers. The program was well received in the Fall of 2015 and the school’s educators and students are excited for “Cooking as Science” lessons to continue this Spring. The lessons are used to provide a novel and creative approach to learning crucial scientific concepts. The Exploring Phases Changes Through Ice Cream and Chocolate Sauce lesson plan was particularly successful. Students enjoyed both the process of making their own ice cream, gaining hands-on experience with phase changes, and eating the delicious outcomes!

Carefully making delicious chocolate sauce

Enjoying the final product: creamy, fresh ice cream with rich chocolate sauce

Experiencing ice cream phase changes

Pickles Made by students

by Emily Pence, co-founder and outreach coordinator, Young Chefs.

The Young Chefs Program: From Cooking to Science has taken many new directions since we last sent an update. We are delighted to share that our program keeps growing and growing. This email highlights some of our newest developments, including new curriculum, summer programming, the building of a garden in Northfield, MN, and ways for you to become involved in our initiative.

We developed new open-access lesson plans and resources… expanding our open-access curriculum to 18 lessons, with more coming soon! The newest lessons explore a range of different concepts, including:

• molecular neuroscience and chemical solubility (chili peppers)
• acids and bases (homemade pickles)
• crystal formation and microscopic-macroscopic relationships (chocolate)
• protein crosslinking and gluten formation (pie crusts)
• physical changes (popcorn)
• olfaction and physiology (spice-roasted nuts)
• catalysis and the Maillard Reaction (onions)

Have a look for yourself, https://youngchefsprogram.org/curriculum/lesson-plans/. We also updated and refined our old lesson, and added new educator facing resources such as science standards grids, culinary skills grids, and networks.

We expanded our program to new locations… Our curriculum is now used regularly by educators all across the U.S, as well as locations in Canada, China, Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom. People are implementing our resources in science museums, classrooms, after school programs, summer camps and their own homes. We are very excited to continuously extend our network of educators and students involved in science and cooking education. Find a map of all our programs at https://youngchefsprogram.org/our-story/current-projects/

We built a school garden at the local middle school in Northfield, MN… Funded by Kitchen Garden Laboratory and spearheaded by Carleton students Erin Roth ’16 and Christian Purnell ’17, this garden is now fully operational, serving as an edible laboratory for the students enrolled in the summer BLAST program taking Young Chefs classes in Northfield. You can read the latest updates on our blog, https://youngchefsprogram.org/blog/ 

We brought our curriculum to new communities and educators during the summer… Summer of 2015 was a busy time for us. In addition to the weekly summer programming in Northfield, MN, we have worked closely with Bill Yosses and had the opportunity to work with NYC STEM public school teachers in the curriculum to bring to NYC classrooms in the fall; we worked with Harvard Medical School hosting workshops on the modern science of indigenous foods for Native American high school students and teachers; we worked with Harvard SEAS to use our curriculum in their weekly summer programming bringing cooking and science to underserved youth in Cambridge, MA, and much, much more. For the full story of our some of summer adventures, see https://youngchefsprogram.org/2015/08/05/a-summer-in-natures-farmacy-finding-new-connections-between-cooking-science-and-social-change/

If you’re excited about The Young Chefs Program and want to get involved in the initiative… there are several ways you can partner with us

1. Use our curriculum! We’d love for you to try out our lesson plans. Whether you want to try them out in your own kitchen, or a professional industrial kitchen, or a public school class room, lesson plans can be requested at https://youngchefsprogram.org/educators/request-lesson-plans/.
2. Write your own lesson plan! We invite you to contribute your voice and creativity to our resources. To find the template, go tohttps://youngchefsprogram.org/curriculum/get-started/ and email us your lesson when it’s done and we will review and publish it!

These are great times to be involved with cooking and science education. We are excited to share these new developments and expand our network of educators and organizations using cooking to combat inequalities in health and STEM education. We remain deeply committed to making this creative approach to science and cooking healthy food to ALL young people.

Stay hungry!

The MIT Media Lab Open Agriculture (“OpenAG”) Initiative is on a mission to bring out the farmer in everyone by creating healthier, more engaging, and more inventive food systems. The OpenAG Food Computer is a controlled environment agriculture system that allow users to grow food inside of specialized chamber that can be programmed, modified, manipulated, upgraded, and hacked as users experiment to find the perfect growing recipes for their favorite fresh foods. To get this project started, they are recruiting the world’s most curious, innovative, and enthusiastic scientists out there – kids. Today’s students have grown up in a world of rapidly evolving technology and they are natural born experimenters, programmers, and tinkerers.

Sounds familiar?

openAG = Kids + Food + Science + Education = Young Chefs

After connecting with the OpenAG team this past summer (introduced by indigenous peoples scholars and national geographic explorers mary and jon waterhousentroduced by indigenous peoples scholars and national geographic explorers mary and jon waterhouse), the Young Chefs team was inspired by the possibility of using the Food Computer to teach the science of food growing in engaging and accessible ways. In July we had the opportunity to visit and meet with the founder, Caleb Harper, exploring how to integrate their portable growing devices into the Young Chefs curriculum, eventually giving students the opportunity to learn about the science of food as it develops from the seed to the plate.

From meeting Caleb Harper and connecting with the team, it became clear that we had a shared mission: to develop resources that are both open access and center on a shared commitment to build food and science literacy in the next generation.

Today, we are excited to announce an official collaboration with the team. This involves cooperation on curriculum development for their ongoing efforts, but more importantly, invites Young Chefs to use and experiment with the food computer to integrate its gardening powers into our hands-on cooking science lesson plans. From the summer and on, we will use it to develop lesson plans that focus on scientific concepts relevant to food growing, such as environmental science, nutrition, organismal biology, plant metabolism, physics of energy. But the most innovative aspect of the partnership is that the food computer invites students to learn basic programming languages such as Raspberry Pi, thus integrating computer science into the Young Chefs model. In other words, the food computer expands both the scientific and culinary component of our curriculum; from botany, to engineering, and programming to nutrition, the Food Computer offers many new edible experiments for students worldwide.

We are extremely excited about this collaboration and are looking forward to not only developing the materials and working closely with the OpenAG team, but also to bring food computers to our workshops with educators and students in NYC (funded by NYC Department of Education), in Native American communities, Boston, and beyond. We are eternally grateful to the OpenAG team for making this happen!!

What Settings Are Curriculum is Used In. This graph was generated from data of what settings educators are using Young Chefs curriculum in. 

In addition to The Young Chefs curriculum and resources being used in a vast variety of places, now from Sri Lanka to New York City,  educators are also using it in a diverse array of different settings. The graph above shows a breakdown of what spaces our curriculum is being used in. As you can see, the majority of the time, are lesson plans are used in either during school or in after school programs. But a significant amount of people are also testing them out in their own home kitchens, at different summer camps, and recently, even in science museums.

This diversity in settings where educators use our curriculum speaks to the adaptability of our lesson plans. We are continuing to work hard to generate lesson plans that can enhance as many different settings and programs as possible. We are also working to clearly communicate what resources you might need for each lesson plan, so you can feel prepared to teach our curriculum in which ever setting you want. Take a look at our Teaching Resources to find more information.

Are you eager to try out making chocolate, learning about polymers or experimenting with pickles in your classroom, home kitchen, or a new frontier? Get started and request some lesson plans here!