by Agnes Molnar

As the Food Bank launched the CookShop Program’s 16th year this past fall, I was struck by how much the program has grown since a small team of dedicated staff at the Community Food Resource Center (CFRC), myself included, held the program’s first launch.

CFRC – which changed its name to FoodChange a few years before merging with the Food Bank – began a pilot program in 1994 under a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) competitive grants program that was looking for innovative ways to improve the nutritional intake of low-income populations. Initially called the Central Harlem Collaborative Nutrition Education Program, CookShop was one of only a handful of programs in the country that was funded through these grants.
 
The goal of the initial program was to increase schoolchildren’s consumption of nutritious food and to reach parents and others in the Central Harlem community through cooking workshops held at community organizations and housing projects. CFRC developed elementary-school curricula and teacher-training materials that focused on hands-on, food and nutrition activities for the classroom. After just one year in a few Central Harlem schools, it was clear to CFRC that the program had incredible potential to promote healthy eating in New York City’s low-income neighborhoods – areas that often suffer from a high incidence of diet-related diseases such as diabetes, obesity and hypertension.

As readers of this blog know, our elementary-school and adult programs are now known respectively as CookShop Classroom and CookShop for Adults. Additionally, CookShop has now expanded to include EATWISE, our CookShop Program for Teens.

And the biggest accomplishment? Altogether, the Food Bank’s CookShop Programs are expected to reach more than 14,000 children, teens and adults throughout the five boroughs this school year.

Longtime child nutrition advocate Agnes Molnar was Director of the Child Nutrition Unit at Community Food Resource Center (CFRC; later FoodChange) from 1981 to 2003, where her advocacy was instrumental in convincing the city to implement the first pilot Universal School Lunch program (using USDA’s Provision 2), to provide free school breakfasts to all public school students, and to expand the Summer Food Service Program to include city parks, swimming pools and public housing developments.  Agnes designed and received USDA funding to implement the model nutrition education program for food stamp-eligible populations that evolved into CookShop.  As co-founder of Community Food Advocates, Agnes is now working on a campaign to make school meals free to all New York City public school students.