The children gather around, knives laid before them. Each workstation has graham crackers, plates of fresh fruit, and ramekins of cream cheese. It’s winter break, and two students have tuned in virtually for the snack-and-story-time session.
Executive Chef Ashley Keyes, or Chef Ashley as the kids know her, has already provided them aprons and a primer on knife safety. Some might not use them at home, Keyes says, but “you come into my kitchen, you’ve got to use a knife.”
Autumn Murray, 4, requires assistance from grandmother Stephanie Murray, but the other youngsters, ranging from 7 years old to 16, follow along as Keyes demonstrates how to slice the fruits.
They’re making “stoplight snacks,” so named because the cream cheese-anchored strawberries, bananas, pineapple, grapes, and kiwi on the graham crackers resemble the traffic device.
Chef Ashley tells the kids to pick the fruits they enjoy. Some aren’t so sure. A few haven't seen a whole pineapple or eaten kiwi, so Keyes encourages everyone to have a taste. The kiwi is not a hit. That’s OK.
“My goal is to teach people how to eat,” Keyes says. “We’ve had kids who’ve never had blueberries and strawberries before, so this is about opening up their palates to try new things.”
When one child scrunches her face upon tasting cream cheese, Keyes tells her she can substitute it with peanut butter or Greek yogurt at home. Everyone wants a second cracker. Some pile it high with fruit, making it more of a tart. As the kids nosh, Keyes’ team plays a short documentary on Garrett Morgan, the African American inventor of the three-way traffic signal.
Welcome to CHOICES Community Teaching Kitchen in Atlanta. CHOICES — which stands for the Center Helping Obesity in Children End Successfully — is where people of all ages can come to learn how to plan, source, prep, and eat healthy food.
It’s part of a growing trend of teaching kitchens that aim to improve nutrition and reduce obesity among Americans. Scientists already know that good dietary habits have a huge impact on health outcomes. A small but growing body of research suggests that teaching kitchens could help.
“This Should Be Part of Conventional Medicine”
Chef Ashley is a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef who previously worked for Disney resorts and Atlanta Bread. She hosts classes on maximizing government food benefits and shopping for simple, whole foods in season. She’s also offered grocery store and farmers market tours. She keeps ingredients affordable, about $30 to feed a family of four.
In addition to her training in food prep and nutrition, she brings a valuable personal perspective. From an early age, she enjoyed being in the kitchen and knew she wanted to be a “cooker,” but she wasn’t yet knowledgeable about healthy eating. Her diet started to affect her health. By age 17, she had type 2 diabetes and weighed almost 400 pounds. She had gastric bypass surgery at age 18 and began paying closer attention to her diet.
Her mother, Vanetta Keyes, an accountant, founded CHOICES in 2002 because of her daughter’s health issues. Now, when Chef Ashley meets people struggling as she did, she speaks from experience: “You may be overweight, but you didn’t gain it all in one day. You’re not going to lose it in one day.”
Since 2002, CHOICES has operated food pantries, boot camps, and educational programs for school, hospital, government and community groups. The food pantry is on pause due to recent federal funding cuts, but over Thanksgiving, CHOICES fed almost 3,000 families, offering online cooking classes and partnering with Amazon to deliver groceries to seniors facing food insecurity.
That’s a tremendous resource in a place like Atlanta, where 1 in 4 lives more than a half mile from access to fresh produce and many don’t get enough to eat. (Nationwide, 47 million people, almost 1 in 7 Americans, live in households without sufficient quantities of nutritious food, according to the USDA.)
Even for those who have access to the right foods, many get too much added sugar, trans fats, and processed foods and not enough whole grains, lean proteins, vegetables, and fruits. That’s part of why two-thirds of American adults have overweight or obesity, and doctors know poor diet and obesity are real risk factors for diseases like type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and even cancer.
Teaching kitchens can help turn the tide, says Walter Willett, MD, DrPH, a Harvard University professor of epidemiology and nutrition. Willett says we should use teaching kitchens to stop disease before it starts.
“Basically, every organ in the body is affected by poor diets,” says Willett, who studies how lifestyle affects disease. “We really should be starting in kindergarten, or at least before people get a complication of diet or nutrition. Sometimes it’s too late to reverse the damage.”
Willett says flatly: “This should be part of conventional medicine.”
“Now, I Know What Not to Eat”
Grandmother Stephanie Murray didn’t arrive at Keyes’ kitchen by accident. She credits CHOICES with helping her navigate type 2 diabetes, two strokes, and congenital heart failure. For years, she picked up fresh produce as a food pantry client and chipped in doling out food and school supplies to other clients.
Her health and family obligations forced a hiatus, but she returned in 2022 as a full-fledged volunteer and began taking notes from Keyes on what foods to stay away from and how to prepare meats and vegetables with healthy seasonings. Years later, her blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol are all better. She boasted to Keyes that her health had improved to the point her endocrinologist no longer needs to see her.
“It changed my life tremendously. … I started getting active, and Ashley told me, ‘We’re going to change the way we eat.’ Now, I know what not to eat. I don’t touch it,” she says, pausing to concede an occasional weakness for soda.
Murray brought four of her grandchildren, aged 4 to 16, to the snack-and-story-time hour. She wants them to start making healthier choices than she did at their age.
One of them, Jeremiah Murray, 16, has been a regular at CHOICES since 2022. He volunteers with Keyes to help others learn more about healthy cooking — a source of pride for his grandmother.
After the session, another grandchild, 11-year-old Peyton Still, said she appreciates the freedom to be creative with healthy snacks. Stoplight snacks are so easy that she can make them for her siblings. Added bonus: What she learns in the teaching kitchen can help her keep grandma healthy.
“I want to help her as much as I can,” Peyton says. “If she says she doesn’t want to drink soda, I tell her there are ways to flavor water so she doesn’t end up in the hospital, so she can stay healthy, and we can do fun things.”
Teaching Kitchens in Medical Schools
A wave of medical school teaching kitchens — like George Washington University’s Seva Teaching Kitchen — aims to better train future clinicians on the problems of obesity and nutrition, a shortcoming in current medical school curricula, according to many experts. The hope is that future doctors will get better at imparting that knowledge to their patients.
“They become the force multipliers to help teach the community,” says Timothy Harlan, MD, director of the George Washington University Culinary Medicine Program and president of the American College of Culinary Medicine, which supports and provides programs for teaching kitchens across the country.
Poor eating habits are too often the reason people find themselves in exam rooms, Harlan says. It’s not enough for a doctor to tell someone, “Eat healthy.” Teaching kitchens help doctors and patients translate that oft-lacking advice into practical ways to reduce sodium and sugar or boost fiber, he says.
If teaching kitchens in medical settings were the norm, it could improve many people’s length and quality of life and save hundreds of billions in health care costs, Harlan says.
Harlan and his colleagues launched the first teaching kitchen in a medical school in 2012: the Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine at Tulane University. Now, about 60 medical and academic institutions use the American College of Culinary Medicine’s “Health Meets Food” courseware, which combines case-based learning, hands-on cooking, and seminar-style case discussion.
Other institutions have their own programming, he says, and he’s working to bolster partnerships between food service and health care professionals to further accelerate change. Culinary medicine is no longer the “lonely corner” it once was, he says.
“The pace in the last 10 years has picked up dramatically. The last three to five years, it’s happening at a breakneck pace,” Harlan says.
“Maybe not in my career, but certainly in my lifetime, every medical school and other health professions — nursing, dietetics, [physician assistants], pharmacy — they will have teaching kitchens and incorporate this type of curriculum.”