Cooking is an essential skill that everyone should know, and that’s why South High offers students the opportunity to learn.
Family consumer science teacher Rachel Landsness is one of the teachers responsible for teaching students how to cook. “I prepare students to work on their own in the kitchens,” she said.
“We start with easy stuff like cookies and pancakes, and then we go into harder foods like scones and different foods with proteins, but I always encourage students to find foods that they want to make,” she added.
Landsness said she became interested in cooking because it was one way that she and her mother were able to spend time together; cooking was also a tradition passed down from her grandmother.
South’s foods-based class offers book work as well as skills practice in order to learn about food and how to cook.
“In class we take notes on different types of foods, their benefits and drawbacks,” said junior Denise Lagunas. What Lagunas likes about the class is that it is a fun environment in which you get to hang out with other students while making food.
Junior A.J. Southward said that he loves eating the food he makes and using what he learned in class to make it at home.
Landsness said she loves watching students cook for the first time, especially students who have never cooked before. Vontrell Ray, a first-year foods class student, said cooking is therapeutic for him; “it gets stressful things off my mind.”
While cooking can help with your mental health, cooking is also a skill that is needed in the real world.
“Everyone in this kitchen will end up living on their own, and cooking is an important skill that needs to be learned,” Landsness said. “Cooking should be important to everyone because anywhere you go, like a gathering or a party, you always find food.”
Denise • Jan 13, 2025 at 11:05 am
Wow, what a good story!