🍲 TREE 630: Food taught Jeff Gill to write

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The more Christine and I worked with people, the more important food became to us. Communion, a sacred shared meal, is the central ritual of Christianity. Eating together is at the core of human society. We started making food a more important part of our classes and meetings with i61’s kids. We started a weekly club where kids came to cook, eat and play together. When government policies meant kids were going hungry over the summer, we joined teamed up with some folks at another church that were doing a weekly family supper club. I went to college.

I wanted to properly understand food. My local college offered a degree in Culinary Arts, so I signed up. I learned to cook in a catering kitchen. I learned what the best chefs in the world were up to. I learned how people eat across the UK and around the world. I watched Food, Inc., which changed my life forever. I learned how to use my time well. Having a family, working full-time and doing a degree is hard but doable if you are organised. I learned to write. Even if your degree is about food, you have to do an awful lot of reading and writing to earn it.

I started my studies concerned about the state of children’s diets and lack of cooking skills. I finished it absolutely appalled. I learned about food deserts and the benefits of eating together as a family. I learned that a traditional diet of real food will keep you healthy whether you are in northern Canada, Japan or the Mediterranean. I learned that children in the UK are mostly eating ultraprocessed fake food apart from their families. Hello obesity, diabetes and rotten teeth! Schools try to help but when they teach high schoolers to make fruit salad or spend nine lessons just to make bread rolls, they aren’t doing much good.

For my thesis, I ran a six-week cookery club at a primary school with eight kids aged eight and nine. I wanted to find out if the culinary techniques of the world’s best chefs could be used with kids to create interest in cookery and effectively teach basic cookery skills? We made stuff like edible stones, air bread and transparent ravioli. My club cost the same to or less to run as a typical after-school cooking club. We did as much cooking in a six weeks as most British kids do in three years of school. Obviously the kids loved it.

I didn’t go on to start a campaign to change cooking in UK homes and schools, but I did contribute some novel research that continues to be read on a regular basis. And I learned how to write in the same way people learn how to cook which is the way people learn how to do anything, by attentively doing it over and over and over again.

Here’s where we’re up to: I’m a former radio DJ, former pastor, former karate black belt, graphic designer, artist, writer who has a degree in Culinary Arts. Super normal, right?

Grow slowly
Jeff