Best Practices: Ministry of Food

I'd like to start this post off by picking up on my last one, when I quoted Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:

Cooking good food is mostly a matter of having the palate and the skill.

A palate, I think, simply comes with time and a willingness to try a variety of foods. Take, for example, my beloved boyfriend - Pete:


Pete didn't eat vegetables for 25 years.

Seriously.

Probably not since he looked like this:

Pete's the crayon. Sorry, I couldn't resist.

He was raised on canned yams and microwaved broccoli, and when we met almost 6 years ago his philosophy was to avoid eating anything green.

I don't blame him.

Over time - after many trips to farmers markets and farms, after watching Jamie Oliver dig up and prepare veggies from his garden (god bless the Food Network), after buying and preparing fruits and vegetables in their natural state (brussel sprouts actually come on stalks and carrots more often resemble crooked crone's fingers than the symmetrical cones that Bugs Bunny munches) - Pete learned to love vegetables.

"I'll eat just about any vegetable now... as long as I respect where it came from," he comments from the other side of the room.

Skill is a little trickier.

Whatever skill Pete and I now have in the kitchen was accrued by trial and error over many home-cooked meals. I'm not sure I'll ever live down the time tried to cook chicken by mashing it into a frying pan with my spatula, burning it and the onions surrounding it and setting off the fire alarm in my apartment while my dinner guests asked if I needed any help. I wouldn't wish some of those experiences on anyone...

Fortunately, we have Jamie. Well... okay... we don't, but the Brits do. (Yes, I'm finally getting around to that "best practices" bit.) Jamie Oliver has set up Britain's first Ministry of Food. It's not actually an official ministry, but it is doing a bang-up job of getting people to cook their own meals and of educating the English on the origins of their ingredients. With this program, Jamie takes out a lot of the trial and error, imparting instantaneous skill and launching the participants directly into cooking tasty meals of their own.

How does he do it, you ask?

Simple: I know how to cook a few dishes (as messy as that learning process may have been) and I have at least two friends who don't know how to cook at all. It's simple arithmetic: if I host a dinner party and cook the meal with my two friends, teaching them how to make the dish in the process, then there are now 3 people who know how to cook a dish or two. His catch is that those two friends should then go and teach that dish to two of their friends, and so on... exponentially increasing the number of people who can cook.

Here's a promo for his program:



This video is a bit more informative, but they wouldn't let me embed it.

I just think the idea is genius in its simplicity - and who doesn't like to have a few friends over for wine and food? Brilliant.