Cooking A Healthy Meal Program at The Riverside Center
Juliette Tahar, a French-born natural food expert founded Healthy Living, Inc., to revolutionize the way disadvantaged people eat. She uses grant money to teach families who are residents of Ward 7, a neighborhood in Washington DC, how to cook a healthy meal. The free program is advertised and hosted at the Riverside Center, a community center that hosts a variety of programs for the area’s residents.
Juliette selected Ward 7 in part because “It’s a food desert. There is only one supermarket in the entire Ward! So most people rely on fast food for their nutritional needs.”
The enthusiasm with which the class has been received indicates there is a thirst for knowledge, and that often people eat unhealthy food simply because they do not know otherwise. At a recent class, participants shared that they ate enriched flour-based products, often fried, and sugar-laden drinks because they weren’t aware of alternatives. Juliette added, “it was rewarding to hear them express that with a little bit of education they were willing and interested in modifying their habits.”
The biggest highlight was watching a 5-year old eating a serving of fresh fruit salad and saying how much she loved blueberries, a fruit she had never seen and tasted before. Juliette said, “My guess is she had actually never eaten fresh fruit in her life.”
Juliette has learned that many children as young as ten, are left on their own to figure out how to prepare breakfast, lunch and even dinner. Unsurprisingly, for many, their trip to the supermarket involves a beeline to the freezer section to buy frozen food that they microwave. One 12-year old explained that he did not know that he could get fresh produce from the same supermarket where he gets his frozen dinner everyday. The class taught him that he could stop by the produce department and at least purchase fresh fruit.
Juliette believes, “it’s not that people don’t want to eat healthy, it’s that they don’t know how to eat healthy. And that involves teaching from the ground up. These families need to learn how to shop, how to fit cooking into their busy lives, and how to ‘keep it simple’. Bottom line though, is that the food is delicious – if it wasn’t we would not be successful.”
Juliette is working on obtaining funding to make this program permanent.
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