Healthy Eating

A cooking project in the Hamburg neighborhood Jensfeld, home to a large number of socially underprivileged families, is helping women rethink their families' diets and start preparing more home-cooked meals.

Once a week for three hours, the participants learn how to whip up delicious healthy meals with little effort and a small budget. Home economics teacher Sabine Kuchenbecker said a lot of people don't know that fast food isn't only unhealthy, it's also expensive.

She said a lot of young women who never learned how to cook automatically think it's cheaper to buy ready-to-serve meals.

"But it's significantly less expensive to cook yourself, especially if you shop a bit price-consciously," Kuchenbecker said. "It's our job to relay these skills to these women."

Battling the bulge with healthy cooking

Every fifth German is too fat, according to the World Health Organization. This trend is particularly prominent among underprivileged families, which tend to eat fast food or ready-to-serve meals. The results are serious health problems, such as diabetes at a young age, stiffening of the joints or even cardiovascular diseases.

The charity Hamburger Tafel or Hamburg Table is coordinating the project, which costs five euros ($6.60) for the five-week course.

For the participants, healthy isn't always easy to get used to, though. The 33-year-old single mother Katja doesn't like mustard and turns her nose up as she takes a sniff of walnut oil to make homemade salad dressing.

"Well, it's okay, but I think it's a matter of taste," Katja said, who usually buys finished products, such as French Dressing, which has lots of preservatives and is more fattening than homemade dressing.

Women like Katja are common in neighborhoods like this. But she wants to change her eating habits, she said.

"I want to learn something about cooking and nutrition because it's important for my daughter," Katja said. Her daughter is three years old and already slightly chubby. Katja's unhealthy diet over the past years is evident in her figure, too.

"I usually go to a snack bar or get pizza," Katja said. But here, she has learned that homemade pizza, for example, only costs about a third of frozen pizza.

Cooking can spice up life

Instructor Kuchenbecker said she wants to motivate these women to try out new things, such as using a different spice or tasting another type of salad. Participant Gaby is taking the course for the second time and has learned a lot. The 43-year-old mother of nine still has four children living at home.

"My kitchen always just had salt, pepper and paprika as spices," Gaby said. "I didn't dare to try anything else. Now, when I make a soup, I put in oregano and thyme and it really tastes better to me."

Even Katja has tried her first homemade dressing with mustard and walnut oil, and it's wasn't bad, she said.

"It tastes good now that I've tried it," Katja said. "I'm going to make my own dressing from now on."

Cooking can boost self-confidence

But the Hamburg course is about more than just affordable meals, Kuchenbecker said. It's also about motivation. A lot of these women have never gotten any confirmation in their lives. Many did poorly in school, for example.

"When you simply say to them, 'wow, you did that well' or 'you did a super job seasoning that,' they really beam at you, as they've maybe never heard that before in their lives," Kuchenbecker said.

So that the women don't forget what they've learned, every participant gets a goodie bag at the end of the course. It holds some necessary groceries and a few basics for the kitchen, like a cookbook and spices.