Essential Food Skills for Adolescents

Guest Author: Ashley Rasmussen

Many adolescents feel they are ill-equipped to make healthy food-related decisions and prepare nutritious meals, mostly because they lack the proper training and resources to do so.  This lack of education seems easily curable, but how and when should it be carried out?

These are the questions Sandra Fordyce-Voorham explores in this month’s Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, in an article entitled… “Identification of Essential Food Skills for Skill-based Healthful Eating Programs in Secondary Schools.”  After interviewing fifty-one “food experts” (a group including actual experts—home economics instructors, nutritionists, dietitians, and chefs—and those with real-world experience—homemakers and twenty-somethings who have lived on their own for several years), it became clear that essential food skills can be broken down into four distinct areas and should be taught both in and out of school to children between the ages of 12 and 18 in order to reap maximum benefits during the young adult years. A successful healthy eating regimen is based upon the possession of four key factors:  knowledge, information, skills, and resources.  Having knowledge involves “a personal awareness and understanding about nutrition” and what comprises a healthy meal.  This knowledge can then be used to apply the information about nutrition found in journals, credible websites, and from expert sources toward starting a healthful eating regimen.  Once knowledge and information have been applied, skills such as the hands-on ability to plan, shop for, prepare, and cook a nutritious meal come into play.

These skills, however, are useless without the proper resources, including a supportive environment that encourages healthy eating, and cooking equipment and access to nutritious foods used to prepare a well-rounded meal. If young people enter the “real world” armed with all four of these tools, they should encounter little struggle along the road to healthy eating.  Unfortunately, many adolescents today were never completely taught these principles either in school or at home during their youth, and as a result feel overwhelmed when trying to choose and prepare nutritious foods. The best solution to this problem is to start teaching these principles early—both in the secondary school environment and at home.  Educators and parents both are responsible for fostering healthy eating habits in children and instilling in them the skills they will need to eat healthfully on their own throughout adolescence and beyond.  It should not be difficult to help children acquire knowledge, information, and skills through hands-on participation in home economics classes at school and involvement in the entire meal-preparation process at home.

The acquisition of resources, however, may be a more difficult process depending on where the individual is located, but community efforts to make healthy food and cooking equipment available are a good place to start. Based on personal experiences volunteering with a cooking and nutrition afterschool program for inner-city high schoolers, I can attest to the fact that most adolescents want to prepare and eat nutritious meals; they just often lack the training and resources to do so.

Making the foundations of nutrition and meal preparation more accessible and less scary for adolescents—whether in a school, home, or community setting—is the key to fostering a lifetime of healthy eating habits.