Cooking Classes Fundamental to Family Meals

By: Tom Cosgrove, Manager, Program and Development, FMI Foundation

“I wish we had more Laura’s,” said Linda Novick O’Keefe, CEO of Common Threads, referring to Laura Karet.

Laura Karet is CEO of Giant Eagle, a grocery chain headquartered in Pittsburgh with stores throughout the Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic states. Common Threads is a nonprofit dedicated to improving the health of America’s children through cooking and nutrition education.

Common Threads offers cooking classes for children and families along with educator training in nine cities - soon to expand to 14. Earlier this year, when the nonprofit opened up shop in Pittsburgh, Karet was instrumental in its success by rallying C-level executives in local government, school districts, foundations and throughout the community to get involved.

“When the leader at a retail chain like Giant Eagle is supportive of this idea that family eating and cooking is a life choice, it becomes infectious,” Novick O’Keefe said.

That kind of grassroots partnership with food retailers is the reason why Common Threads is such an active partner in the FMI Foundation’s National Family Meals Month campaign to encourage families to eat one more meal together every week.

Novick O’Keefe said, “A partner like FMI Foundation really helps us elevate the conversation around the importance of eating together as a family and how the dinner table anchors all of us.”

Common Threads has a portfolio of evidence-based programs (“We analyze everything,” Novick O’Keefe said) for schools and community-based organizations targeting children and families. Evaluations have shown that those who participate in Common Threads programs have increased vegetable consumption, nutrition knowledge, confidence in their cooking skills and more.

There are afterschool cooking classes where children take an imaginary plane ride to a foreign country each week and learn how to make healthy, affordable dishes from that country. Common Threads offers family cooking classes where parents and children together learn how to make healthy meals at home on a budget.

It offers the Cooking for Life Handbook, downloadable for free at www.commonthreads.org, with tips and recipes for eight weeks of healthy family meals that can be made for less than $10 each.

Finally, it offers a full curriculum of nutrition lessons that pre-K through eighth-grade teachers can implement in their classrooms and receive continuing education credit for completing.

At the heart of Common Threads’ mission, Novick O’Keefe said, is the food retailer.

“It goes to our philosophy that it’s going to take a village to move the needle with regard to childhood obesity,” she said. “Food retailers play a really important role and have for a very long time. The grocery store is where people go, where they convene.”

“The family meal is our mantra, the fabric of who we are.”

Thank you to Common Threads and all of the partners that made National Family Meals Month™ 2017 so successful.  Don’t forget to submit your company’s program for a Gold Plate award (Due October 31) and start planning for 2018!