Eleven years ago, I started my career at Vetri Community Partnership as a Culinary Classroom Educator. In that role, I would drive my station wagon to Philadelphia schools, teaching multiple 45-minute cooking and nutrition education classes during the school day to encourage kids to cook and enjoy fruits, veggies, and whole grains.
After working as a server at Pizzeria Vetri for the prior year, I was thrilled to expand on the skill of talking about food with diners to teaching about and preparing food with classrooms of students. The idea of turning classrooms into kitchens and weaving together lessons that build culinary confidence and nutrition knowledge was, and continues to be, so energizing and inspiring.
As an educator, I would prepare the lesson plan, equipment, recipe cards, materials, and ingredients to engage up to 30 youth per class in hands-on nutrition education through cooking. In the spring of 2017, students in partner schools joined me to make a Summer Vegetable Salad recipe – now living on in our programs as a Rainbow Salad with Pickled Onions.
Through Culinary Classroom sessions like this one, students worked in groups to build the dish before tasting it together. We learned about knife safety and skills including the “bridge” and “bear claw” grips, kitchen tools and ingredient measurement, nutrition topics like the importance of eating a rainbow of fruits and vegetables, and science topics like pickling, emulsifying, and heat transfer. In addition to the skills and knowledge gained, I watched students feel proud of what they were able to accomplish, learn from mistakes, and work as a team.
Culinary Classroom laid some of the groundwork for what would become our in-school time, SNAP-Ed direct education program. When Vetri Community Partnership was awarded SNAP-Ed funds in 2017, we gained access to the dollars and program guidance that allowed our organization to expand our reach, refine our approach, and access a larger network of evidence-based resources and partner organizations.
From 2013 through 2017, Culinary Classroom provided 4,800 nutrition education through cooking experiences for youth in Philadelphia. In our eight years receiving SNAP-Ed funding from 2017 through 2025, our incredible team of six educators provided 114,265 nutrition education through cooking experiences for youth in Philadelphia.
For over 30 years, federal investment through SNAP-Ed funding helped to provide nutrition education at scale across the nation. Now, it’s gone. Though this funding has been eliminated, Vetri Community Partnership remains committed, as ever, to the importance of providing high-quality nutrition education experiences in the classroom.
Since working as a Culinary Classroom Educator, I’ve held almost every role there is at Vetri Community Partnership and, for the last several years, I have been lucky enough to be the CEO here. Though I don’t get to spend nearly as much time in our kitchen classrooms, I am more certain than ever that all students in Philadelphia deserve to feel proud dicing an ingredient or using a new kitchen tool, try something that makes their tastebuds dance, and find joy cooking and eating together.
Culinary Classroom is part of Vetri Community Partnership’s foundation and, thanks to everyone who has remained committed to this work, will remain an integral part of our organization. Culinary Classroom is our past, our present, and now, our future.
