We promise our college students a lot these days. We promise them a quality education, access to top professors and an intellectually active campus. We promise them the opportunity to think critically, build their leadership skills and express their creativity. We want them to have a solid foundation for the road ahead. And yet we have overlooked one of the most basic, fundamental skills anyone can have for leading a healthy and successful life.

We forgot to teach them how to cook.

In a nation where diet-related deaths have increased dramatically and eating has become not only a personal issue but a social and political one, we are not teaching students one of the easiest ways to improve the quality of their life and the vitality of their communities. We have to start eating well. And the only way to eat well is to know how to cook.

When I became interested in cooking during middle school, I had no idea what a difference it would make in my life. Cooking allowed me to take control of a large part of my life. In my case, it gave me the skills to start a catering business with a friend during high school, has been a large part of my social and extracurricular life at college, and has allowed me to eat well, whenever I want and with whatever resources might be available to me.

Many colleges throughout the country are already doing great work that allows their students to eat better. At Wesleyan University, where I attend, the dining service (we use Bon Appétit Management Company) is working with student groups to ensure twenty percent of the food used in campus dining halls is sourced from local vendors. Half an hour away, the Yale Sustainable Food Project runs an organic farm, looks into academic issues related to food and works with the sustainable dining program for their university. Additionally, projects like Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard bring middle-school students into the garden and the kitchen for lessons in cooking and healthy eating. These and other programs are real steps in the right direction towards getting us to eat better and improve our relationship with food and with our communities.

But even at these universities, too many students leave college without any knowledge of how to cook for themselves. Learning how to microwave instant ramen is not a cooking skill. When we enter the real world, we need to be able to provide for ourselves. We aren’t cooking or feeding ourselves in a way that is sustainable for our own lives, our communities or our country. When frozen dinners and fast food drive-by windows have become a norm in many households, we need to make a change. We need to teach people how to cook.

These skills, of course, should not only be provided to those fortunate enough to attend college. But college is a particularly appropriate place to educate our youth about food and cooking for a variety of reasons. For one, colleges have a concentration of individuals about to enter the real world with the time and interest to partake in activities that improve the quality of their lives. Otherwise they wouldn’t be at college. Many colleges already have programs in place to improve the quality of students’ relationship with food. Why should a skill as basic as cooking not be included in these initiatives? Colleges should offer cooking lessons and activities that teach students how to cook. Additionally, colleges are often a catalyst for social change. If we are going to change the way America eats, we should empower our college youth to take part in that change.

The food movement today is alive as ever and is improving the way we eat in real and significant ways. Much of the focus so far has been on greater availability of fresh, healthy food and on encouraging everyone to eat better, whether through making better choices at the grocery store or improving lunches at public schools. These are all vitally important steps in the process. But we must focus on teaching people how to cook food. The food movement cannot exist without everyone being able to take home fresh, local produce and make a delicious meal from it. The process of actually cooking is the most personal way we can connect with the food movement. We have a nation of college students waiting to learn how. Let’s teach them.

Will Levitt is a senior at Wesleyan University. He is the founder and editor of the blog Dorm Room Dinner.

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“Hahhh!” We were literally and figuratively blown away. In the middle of a qigong demonstration, Master Wu pushed his palms out with a loud shout. The energy that radiated from his palms was so forceful that even at a distance of ten feet, we barely managed to stop ourselves from rearing back.

It is the year 2009 and we are in Hai Nan Island in South China. Hai Nan is a former penal colony mid-way between China and Vietnam that boasts of shimmering white sandy beaches and a deep blue sea. In the last 30 years, it has been transformed by the firm hands of China’s economic revolution into a Hawaii-esque playground brimming with six-star resorts for the rich and famous. It has also been the chosen venue for the yearly Miss Universe pageant.

It is doubtful whether Master Wu pays much attention to Miss Universe. He is a Shao Lin Kung Fu master of the highest order and spends most of his days honing his prized Kung Fu skills, from smashing bricks with his bare fist to doing a hundred push ups on three fingers. His boyish, unassuming good looks belie his seriousness towards his art.

We flew from Hong Kong to Hai Nan to meet Master Wu. He started by giving a two-hour recital of the Heart Sutra in his beautiful voice, and proceeded to give us a demonstration of various qigong moves. We waited patiently for him to finish, then at the end of the session we approached to ask the one question that we have been waiting for. “What is the most ideal food for a human?” He fell silent and looked pensive. Then, his face brightened, his eyes sparkled, and with a slow smile, he said: “A steamed vegetable dumpling, made by your mother.”

This was unexpected. At the time, we were strict raw vegans, and saw and judged everything with a raw vegan mindset. We were waiting for him to give us the answers that we wanted to hear. Would he say raw sprouts? Green juices? Chlorella? Tou Fu?

Embedded within this simple statement is a high wisdom of health and happiness. Master Wu went on to expound that the essence of Traditional Chinese Medicine is the balance of the elements — wood, wind, fire, metal, and water, plus a sixth element — love, whose beneficial vibration is transmitted through water, the most impressionable of all the elements, to the food.

This simple and important truth spawned a new realization of a lifestyle diet that included raw, as well as lightly steamed and boiled food that is heated to below 100 degrees celsius (212°F). 100°C is the upper limit beyond which water dissociates into steam; the upper temperature limit that still enables the quantum information in the food to be retained and transmitted to the body.

For those of you who would like to look better, feel better and last a long time, we have an easy new way to do it. Just try this for one day: eat/drink what you like, but take nothing past boiling point. Make your best effort to eat organic and add no condiments/sauces that include processed foods, which are usually heated to very high temperatures in production at the factory. Use Himalayan salt or raw sea salt instead.

This 100°C Vegan lifestyle breaks the unrealistic bonds of all-raw, while maintaining the parameters of perfect health and life-long sustainability.

“It changed my life. It did. Because I was definitely on my way out.” — Bill Edward, V.P. SJLuxury, HK, Ltd.

The mind and body are related. The mind impacts the body and the body impacts the mind. The conditions in our body are influenced by our emotions, by what we think, by how we react to stress, by what we internalize, and by how we relate to life in general. Actions we take that change the conditions in our body can have an impact on whether we get sick and to what degree.

This is not to say that illness and disease will not occur or that all illness and diseases can be avoided. The point is that we can be educated consumers and active participants in determining our own health and wellness, and that there may be available to us new possibilities in relation to our health for consideration.

A helpful analogy is to imagine a fire in your house or apartment. If a fire were to start in one room, one approach is to grab a fire extinguisher and put it out before it gets out of hand. This is an early-detection model of home preservation that may be effective if you’ve taken the previous steps of having a working smoke detector and an adequate fire extinguisher available. You would be aware of the problem and be ready to take action before a fire got too big.

Another approach is the prevention model. Using this model, you have a fire extinguisher and smoke detector in your house or apartment and you take action to reduce the likelihood of a fire ever starting. For example, you might blow out candles before going to bed, replace frayed or cracked electrical cords, keep flammable items away from the cooking area, keep a screen in front of the fireplace, never overload electrical sockets and extension cords, make sure the stove and oven are turned off appropriately, and run matches under water before discarding them.

This is a self-empowerment model in which you take responsibility for practical common-sense actions to create conditions that minimize the risk of a fire and maintain a safe environment in your home. You don’t need to have a degree in fire safety to take effective action. You just need to be generally informed and educated on the topic, then implement appropriate behaviors. Taking these steps doesn’t guarantee that a fire will never occur, but it will help create conditions that promote a safe home environment that reduces the likelihood of a fire.

Empowerment grows from an awareness that there are actions we can take, choices we can make, and ways we can relate to life that promote our own health, wellness, and well-being. We don’t need permission. We don’t need a license.

We can reframe our understandings of health and wellness. We can become more self-aware of our bodies. We can become informed about additional possibilities for addressing our health and wellness concerns. We can shift how we think about them. We can educate ourselves about appropriate actions we can take to impact them in positive ways. Consciously choosing to take those actions is empowerment.

You can learn more about this topic and other self care/personal empowerment topics in Marc Levin’s book Eight Shifts for Wellness: Practical Transformative Steps to Enhance Health, Wellness, and Well-Being and at www.eightshifts.com.

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