Nutrition & Recipes

Click here to subscribe to Food for People's YouTube channel, to see more cooking class videos. 

Also, check out our friend Meagen's cooking show, Cooking Healthy in Indian Country, which she creates herself in Hoopa, CA, often using fresh produce from our programs.

More about our Nutrition Education program

Our Nutrition Education program includes cooking classes and demos, taste tests and recipes for various Food for People programs, with the goal of educating the community about cooking healthy meals on a tight budget, especially with fruits and vegetables. Our Nutrition Educator customizes and updates recipes for our programs continually, to offer ideas on how to stretch a food box as far as possible and provide nutrition tips for good health. Don’t know what to do with that recently donated Jerusalem artichoke, butternut squash or quinoa? Not a problem! We always have recipes available alongside food items, and we often have little sample cups featuring a taste of the recipe, so people can try a new food or produce item. In order to encourage folks to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables, and to promote cooking healthy foods from scratch, our Nutrition Educator puts together “recipe kit” bags, including a recipe and all of the fresh produce ingredients one would need to make it.

Our Nutrition Education program is involved with all of our senior distribution sites and pantries in our Pantry Network, to offer the same services as available in the Choice Pantry. During the summer our Nutrition Educator visits many of our Children’s Summer Lunch sites, to engage children in fun cooking and nutrition activities, always featuring fresh fruits and vegetables.

Learning to cook and eat healthy on a budget

We are committed to keeping our community safe and healthy, and because of the COVID-19 pandemic we are not offering in-person cooking classes at this time. Please check out our cooking videos!

• A new cookbook, Good and Cheap, written specifically for limited income households looking for healthy, creative ways to eat on $4 per day (an average SNAP/CalFresh budget)
• The Tenderloin Cookbook School is a cookbook created in San Francisco for households cooking in small spaces or with access only to a microwave, rice cooker, or slow cooker (or a stove). The cookbook is free online!
• Find healthy, low-cost recipes in English, Spanish, and Chinese at eatfresh.org, a website full of delicious, creative, and healthy recipes for limited-income households who are or might be eligible for CalFresh. (If you live in Humboldt County and would like to apply for CalFresh, you can not apply through eatfresh.org, you must apply at www.c4yourself.com.)

• Maintaining a Healthy Diet in a Food Desert offers tips on how to incorporate fresh foods into a diet when living in an area that lacks access to a grocery store and/or a good selection of fresh and nutritious foods. This includes preserving fresh produce for later use, starting a garden, utilizing frozen foods, and more.
• This Seasonal Food Guide tells you what foods grown near you are in season during any given month.

• 10 complete proteins for vegetarians and vegans (with recipes)

Visit our Gardening with CalFresh + Farmers' Markets page, which has:

• Instructions for growing a wide variety of specific fruits and vegetables in your garden
• Information on utilizing CalFresh at local farmers' markets and accessing free bonus Market Match dollars
• Information about Humboldt County farms that accept CalFresh/EBT at their farmstands, and for the purchase of a CSA share.

We regularly promote the Rethink Your Drink campaign, which encourages healthy drink choices by educating the community about the added sugars in sugar-sweetened beverages. Rethink Your Drink lessons teach children and parents how to read nutrition labels to determine the sugar content of sodas, sports drinks and other sweetened drinks. We present Rethink Your Drink lessons in a variety of food bank programs and community settings and encourage families to drink water instead of sugary drinks. 

If you have a question about our Nutrition Education program, give us a call or email our Nutrition Education Coordinator at @email.

Our Nutrition Education Program includes cooking classes, taste tests, and recipes for Food for People's programs, with the goal of teaching how to prepare healthy meals on a tight budget.