Kids in the Kitchen: Food Obsession Hits the Next Generation
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Thomas McNaughton, chef at Flour + Water restaurant, addressed a room full of attentive grade-school-age children. “Today, we’re going to make pig brain lasagna!” he said, smiling broadly. His punch line, though, fell flat. While a typical group of children may have squealed at the gross image, the students from Sprouts Cooking Club, a training program for aspiring young foodies, did not find cooking with brains to be such an outlandish proposition. “We learn that you have to use every part of an animal, even the blood,” said Julia Sweeney, 13, a third-year veteran of the program. Sprouts, a nonprofit in Berkeley that runs four intensive one-week summer camp sessions, as well as after-school programming during the year, is one of several[...]