Good Food at Home - Food Share’s Community Kitchen Program

Through a grant from the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, FoodShare started the Good Food at Home pilot project. The project started in December 2002.

Photo: Allison Goodings

Target

Women in active treatment for breast cancer (surgery, chemotherapy, radiation) – or post-treatment for cooking components.

Goals

This project aims to learn how best to offer practical food support to people in treatment for breast cancer and to support long term healthy eating practices beyond the treatment year in order to optimise good health. It aims to foster the development of healthy relationships with food and focuses on the creative and joyful aspects of eating well in addition to good nutrition.

Operation

This is a unique program with three components. Each component costs $5. The costs of each component are subsidised through the original project grant and through various donations.

The first component of the program is the Wellness Box. The Wellness Box is box of fresh vegetables and fruit with a home cooked soup that is delivered weekly for six months to program participants.

The second component of the project is a series of 5, chef lead, cooking classes. In addition to learning simple, delicious and nutritious recipes inspired by various cultural traditions, the sessions offer participants an opportunity to discuss healthy eating strategies and tools to make informed dietary choices. Women who have received the Wellness box are encouraged to attend the cooking classes. The classes emphasise skill development in a creative, and inspiring environment.

The final component of the project is a community kitchen. The community kitchen is a peer led program. One member who participated in the first two components of the project acts as the facilitator. She facilitates the menu planning process, creates the shopping list and delegates tasks. The Good Food at Home Project Co-ordinator attends each of the kitchens and assists where required. The kitchen is offered once per month. The group mapped out the themes they would like to cover in the program six months in advance and the facilitator had adjusted the plans as necessary. The themes that the women have mapped out are quite diverse. The diversity in themes has allowed the women to participate in a number of different models of community kitchens. Some of the models that the women have participated in include cooking classes, congregate dinning and bulk cooking models.

Photo: Allison Goodings

Location

The Wellness boxes are delivered directly to participant’s homes. The cooking classes take place in the teaching kitchens of various Loblaws Supermarket stores located throughout the city. There is flexibility in choosing which location the program will take place, this allows for greater opportunity for everyone to participate regardless of where they live in the city. Loblaws has donated the space and has provided free groceries for the program. The community kitchen takes place in the kitchen of Whole Foods Market. Whole Foods has donated their kitchen space and $100 worth of food. The kitchen is bright and cheerful but lacks some kitchen equipment. At this point in time the equipment must be borrowed from other kitchens.

Benefits

The wellness box reaches women from across the city – in all age groups and all ethnic and income groups. We have excellent representation from lower income groups and diverse cultural groups. Women, that would never have found their way to the program on their own, have been recruited to the program through the help of a clinic based recruitment strategy.

The cooking classes teach skills and model healthy eating practises in a fun, non-threatening and non-judgmental way.

The community kitchen component of the Good Food at Home Project allows for a continuation of the project for the program participants. It provides a comfortable environment for participants to continue to learn and share cooking skills, and further develop an appreciation for food. It offers participants ongoing emotional support as they learn to live and cope with the un-ending threat of a cancer recurrence. Many participants come for the emotional support which is offered in a format that is very different from a traditional support group format because it is pro-active, positive and health promoting.

Most of the community kitchen participants are younger. This is a benefit because so little is understood about this disease in young women and few if any programs have been developed to support their unique needs. Young women have many different and challenging issues that are not experienced by older women who have the disease – to name a few: the potential inability to ever have children, and for those with children - the fear that they may die before their children have grown. Young women with breast cancer are a very under served group and very few programs exist to meet their needs.

Difficulties

Unlike the Wellness Box (home delivery) program, the cooking classes and community kitchen tend to attract younger women and less cultural diversity. Participants range in income status from being low income to middle income. The community kitchen location is in a very central but in an upscale area of Toronto. Although this may be a barrier to participation for some, it is more accessible than our Field to Table Kitchen space and has resulted in many more women attending. The cost of participating is not a barrier since this can be waived, if necessary.

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