Cooking with Kids: Santa Fe

Excerpt from “The Gift of Lynn Walters” by Lynn Cline
Local Flavor, September 2019

For more than 20 years, Lynn Walters has led a revolution that has transformed how children and their families eat. Sparked by an idea that hands-on learning in public schools could empower children and families to make healthy food choices, Lynn nurtured a small nonprofit from three volunteer chefs to a nationally acclaimed organization that has changed the lives of countless kids in Santa Fe and around the world.

The future came calling when, in 1994, the Santa Fe Student Nutrition Advisory Council asked Lynn to host a breakfast meeting about school meals at The Natural Cafe, known for its innovative international cuisine, including those East Indian specialties.

“At the time, I thought, “It’s not hard to cook real food, what’s the big deal about doing that in schools?” Lynn says. “But I didn’t realize the scope of the regulatory constraints, the history, the funding issues and the social context around nutrition and school meals.” She got permission for three chefs–Kelly Rogers then of La Casa Sena, the Natural Cafe’s Michele Watkins and herself–to work with cafeteria cooks for several days each in three Santa Fe schools.

“Kelly brought tomatoes, chile and cilantro from his garden and made fresh salsa and black beans,” Lynn recalled. “I had this idea that green beans could be a great finger food, so we just blanched them then served the crisp, bright green beans whole. The kids threw them away because most had never tried fresh beans and perhaps thought they’d taste like canned green beans. What we had was a clear and immediate failure.”

But Lynn and her team–particularly Program Director Jane Stacey–persevered. The meetings with the Student Nutrition Advisory Council continued and grew in size. Then Lynn heard about research on food acceptance by Antonia Demas–founder and director  of The Food Studies Institute. She was intrigued and called her.

“Antonia’s project was really interesting in that, to introduce new foods to kids, she had cooking classes in a school with half the students as the intervention group and the other half as the comparison group. She found that when these new foods were served as a side dish in the school cafeteria, the intervention group at five to 20 times more than the comparison group, which had no experience with the new foods.”

Antonia visited Santa Fe and taught a few classes at Salazar and E.J. Martinez elementary schools. Then Chef/Author Deborah Madison and Cafe Pasqual’s Chef/Owner Katharine Kagel, along with a few other chefs, volunteered to teach some elementary school classes, and thus, Cooking with Kids was born.

“That intention to improve school food never really went away,” Lynn says. “We adapted the recipes we developed for classroom cooking lessons for cafeteria use and for many years Cooking with Kids school lunches have been served as part of the regular menu rotation. We’re also now helping to design the menus in collaboration with the Santa Fe Public Schools’ Student Nutrition Department and highlighting school food staff and local farmers who sell their produce to the schools.”