October 20 - International Chefs Day

Posted October 20, 2019

I saw this holiday name and thought - oh, wow, a holiday celebrating the world's chefs! Awesome!

Massimo Bottura
I mean, Massimo Bottura (from Italy) and Dominique Crenn (France), Janice Wong (Singapore) and Gaggan Anand (Thailand), Carolina Bázon (Chile) and Todd English (U.S.) - all these and other chefs SHOULD be celebrated!

Above, Dominique Crenn
Below, one of Crenn's creations
- too pretty to eat, don't you think???

But in actual fact, International Chefs Day is all about helping the chefs of the future develop their potential - in other words, reaching down to kids to teach them how healthy food works and how to make healthy and delicious meals.

Check out the website here.

One thing that can help kids develop healthy eating habits is to absorb visuals that help guide proportions of different kinds of foods: 



It is hard for older folks, who grew up with slightly different advice, to get rid of bad notions to make room for better ones.



The visual above contrasts the "new food pyramid" with the older one. One of the worst things about the old pyramid is that there was a sense that the best is the top - as if foods fell into in a hierarchy, with sweets and fats being the best! - and there was another sense in which grains / rice / bread / corn could be seen as the foundation or base of a healthy diet. In truth, variety could be seen as the foundation of a healthy diet! 



The inverted pyramid above doesn't seem like a hierarchy, and neither the wide top nor the pointy bottom seems to be a base or foundation.

In addition to learning about healthy food, kids should be encouraged to help cook and later cook on their own, and they should be allowed to some extent, at least, to do some experimentation with food combinations and recipes.






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