EATS Park City Virtual Cooking Classes

EATS Park City empowers our community to eat and cook with fun and nutrition advocacy in mind. Through partnerships with local schools to create gardens, cooking class offerings, and nutritious nature camps, EATS PC has become a mainstay of the health food scene in Park City. 

Program Manager, Natalie Kane, writes, “EATS' main objective is to create opportunities for hands-on, food-focused learning, and the more our community engages, learns, and grows with EATS the more we are achieving our vision of healthier generations.”

The shift to virtual programming has only cemented EATS Park City’s commitment to youth and families in the community. First, “EATS partnered with Summit Community Gardens to offer gardening classes at the beginning of the growing season. [They] also posted recipes and ideas of meals and snacks to make while at home and shared ideas about how to cook when groceries were running low on certain items.” Next,
“EATS has continued virtual cooking classes by partnering with the PCSD and meeting with students participating in PCSD summer school every Monday. Students are provided the ingredients for a simple snack and the kitchen tools they need to prepare it. [They] meet with students on Zoom and teach them how to assemble a simple snack, brainstorm with them how they can make the snack themselves in the future, and let them build their own recipe ideas by adding to or changing the ingredients [they] present them with.” Finally, “EATS is also hosting our Family Cooking Class Series virtually this year. In this series of classes, EATS purchases food for 4 and delivers the food to participating families. [They] then host a live cooking class via Zoom to walk through the recipe and learn simple kitchen tips and tricks together.”

So far, Natalie and her team have programmed a summer full of activities that both shifts existing opportunities to a virtual format, and develops new, creative outreach in response to COVID-19. As restrictions on gathering ease, EATS has done its part in assuring that kids this summer stay busy, healthy, and engaged. They have facilitated three partner camps and their final session in coming up. They “work with Summit Community Gardens and Swaner to facilitate engaging, educational, tasty, and fun activities to keep kids ages 6-12 busy during the summer. These partner camps are day camps in which students get to learn from SCG and Swaner and also cook a related meal or snack. So far this summer [EATS has] created a spiral herb garden and planted a raised bed full of food at SCG, learned about how animals eat and how we can study their diets to make ours more nutritional at Swaner, and taught campers how to take ownership over the food they eat therefore expanding their palettes and changing their perceptions of which foods they like and don't like.” Most recently, EATS surprised campers at the Basin Recreation camps with cooking lessons — “a unique, hands-on enrichment activity that is such a change of pace from what they would normally be doing at camp.”

There are countless ways to engage with EATS Park City this summer. Check out upcoming family cooking classes and summer camp programming here: https://eatsparkcity.org/events/. By attending online classes (where EATS delivers all of the ingredients to you!), following their blogs and content at https://eatsparkcity.org/blog/, sharing newsletters with community networks, or donating at https://eatsparkcity.org/donate/, you can directly influence health among youth and eliminate hardships stemming from food insecurities, while finding some new recipes to try out!