Tamra Davis Quotes

Cooking with your kids and engaging them in hands-on activities are two ways to begin to educate children about the healthy eating, and kick start the important task to help change how the younger generation looks at food and nutrition.

The Food Network and the Cooking Channel have so many viewers. And, because there's no violence, some of that audience is children. So, I think we have a responsibility to educate parents how to produce healthy meals for their families.

A few years ago, kids from poor areas in France were asked to draw items of food. For a chicken, they drew a drumstick. For a fish, they drew a fish stick. Those are extremes, but there is a lot that needs to be done to help children discover good food.

There have been some good studies done in California with Hispanic parents where in the course of a year, they have changed their entire nutritional intake for the better. The kid becomes, in a sense, the bridge between the educational process and the home.

Most schools have only a microwave or deep fryer, hardly the tools needed to feed our children real, fresh food.

I always did the cooking at home, and we always tried for balance. We've been vigilant about how and what our kids eat. For example, my son would just as soon go for the grapes as he would the chips... and the chips are baked.

Getting kids into the kitchen preparing the food they and their families will eat results in them viewing food in an entirely new way. If given the right ingredients, that act alone can raise the standards of the quality of the food both they and their family eat.

As parents are usually working, they haven't time to teach children about cooking, and it's a wilderness. They should be given healthy recipes - some standbys so that when they leave home, they don't live on junk.

It should be that every child, when they leave school, can do ten meals, because when they leave home, they've got to be able to eat healthily. Blow the science of it and everything else. They've just got to be able to know what's good for them, how to buy it, and how to make a few dishes that they enjoy and don't cost too much.

I wouldn't say that processed food, ready meals and even takeaways aren't relevant to modern life, it's just that over the past 40 years there are three generations of people who have come out of school and gone through their home life without ever being shown how to cook properly.

Kids see cooking as a creative outlet now, like soccer and ballet. It gives me hope that things like fast food, childhood obesity and the horrible state of school lunches can be addressed by kids and their parents.

Our children's health and well-being are dependent on our commitment to promoting food access and good eating habits at home, at school and in the community.

I think children learning to cook can be such a wonderful thing. It can help build confidence, make them feel good about themselves. It helped me build my ego and even start to get acceptance at school. I'd bring things to class that I'd cooked at home.

When I was first approached for 'Pass the Plate,' I was thrilled because I love to cook. And I love to cook healthy. The reason I started cooking was because I would go to restaurants and have just amazing food but feel so heavy and gross. I would go home and try to cook the same thing, but a healthy version.

When I'm on tour, I'm in really good shape. When I get home, I cook, I eat, I get fat and happy.

I think it's important that people know what they are eating and especially to know what their children are eating.

One reason that we eat processed foods is the decline of home economics. Restarting home economics classes is one of the key things we could do to get this issue moving.

I learned how to cook, began reading books on food. I began to understand about nutrition. It never had occurred to me that what you ate could affect how you felt. It could affect your health. It seems obvious now, but at age 23 or 22 or whatever I was, it wasn't obvious at all.

All schools should teach children basic cooking skills. Every school should be able to buy sustainable, good quality food wherever possible from local sources. Every school should include food-growing in the curriculum. For some, that will mean twinning with willing farms. For others, it will mean literally building their own small farms.

Every public school in the country should have a nutrition-education curriculum. We're creating a pilot program at my son's school. We are looking to create a replicable model that can help bring good nutrition to all children.

It's so important to that we go into the public schools and we feed all of the kids something that is really good for them.

We're adults. We're the ones who should teach the kids what's good to eat. I don't think the government should ever regulate what we eat at home, but we're feeding them in school with tax dollars. Quite frankly, if my tax dollars are being spent to feed kids, I'd rather feed them better food.

When kids help cook, even if its just shredding the herbs or stirring the pot, they eat more and they eat better.

The key thing is to educate not just kids but adults about what goes into food. You do that in any way you can, bread machine or not.

I think that allowing the nation to become so ignorant about food has been such a backward step - and to be honest I don't think there should be a School Food Trust. It shouldn't be necessary.