St. Coletta of Greater Washington

Students Create a Healthy Meal

It’s June 18, 2010, and Juliette Tahar of Healthy Living, Inc., meets the St. Coletta of Greater Washington school staff and eight students with intellectual disabilities aged 16 to 20, at a local grocery store. Juliette organizes the children into two teams: the vegetable team and the grain team. Each has pictures of the ingredients they need to prepare a healthy meal of summer squash, chickpea salad, and barley tabouleh. They search for the ingredients in the pictures.

The teams find all their ingredients, and head for the school, located in Southeast Washington, DC. Additional students and staff join them in a classroom with adjoining kitchen. Juliette begins her lesson for the day. She asks the children to name one thing they ate last week that was healthy and one thing they ate that was not so healthy. For the healthy item, one child shares that she had a salad. They discuss the vitamins that are in a salad and in vegetables in general. For the unhealthy items, someone says she had Chinese food, and another says candy. Juliette explains why Chinese food could be unhealthy – too much oil and salt.

Juliette then tells the children how grains have been around since the beginning of civilization. The students look at pictures of barley being grown in ancient times and compare them to pictures of barley being grown today. A plate of uncooked barley is passed around and everyone gets to feel it before it is cooked.

Juliette then asks for volunteer peelers and cutters. Three students help peel and cut and the staff assists the rest. Juliette explains that tabouli is a salad with vegetables and a grain. She explains that chickpeas are good for you because the beans have protein and protein is very important for health. The barley is finished and brought into the classroom. The children touch a bit of the cooked barley. They add it to the tabouli and the children stir it in. The chickpeas and squash are also brought to the table. Dressing, made by one of the students, is stirred in. The students congratulate each other and then dig in.

Towards the end of the three-hour class, the teacher, Shannon, enters. Shannon shares with the author of this article how much the students are enjoying Juliette’s program. Some have never tasted many of these foods before. The classes also give the students an opportunity to understand how food moves from the garden to the table.