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Midland’s Community Action Agency holds cooking classes to encourage use of WIC foods and reduce food costs
“We want to help provide a good start for families,” says Tammy Karner, coordinator for the Women, Infant and Child (WIC) program in Midland for Mid-Michigan Community Action (MMCCA.) The program helps pregnant and postpartum women, and infants through five years of age.
She and her staff at MMCCA-WIC were concerned when they spoke to clients receiving WIC benefits and learned they don’t always know how to prepare the foods they are eligible to receive.
Faced with the challenge of keeping households enrolled in WIC as long as they are eligible, and encouraging families to make meals at home to improve the quality of food they eat and to save money, staff came up with an informative, fun and successful program.
“We created cooking classes as part of our Healthy Cooking, Healthy Families initiative,” says Tammy, who has worked with WIC clients for nearly 18 years. “The classes are taught by Meagan Kelley, WIC Nutrition Educator. Each class she demonstrates one recipe, such as a soup, that includes most WIC-approved ingredients. She has everything ready when the participants arrive and they get to taste the final product.
Meagan likes to offer other ideas for eating WIC-approved foods, too. When she taught a class on making applesauce, she encouraged the participants to try dipping apple slices into peanut butter for a high-protein snack or meal.
Participants are shown how to read the labels on convenience foods and to look at the first five ingredients listed so they know what they are eating. Meagan stresses the benefits of eating meals at home as a way of incorporating WIC foods and decreasing the overall cost of meals. And at the end of the class, each client goes home with the featured recipe, all the ingredients to make the dish, plus a crockpot.
“Sometimes WIC foods might not be what families are looking for,” explains Tammy. “For example, toddlers at the age of one year old qualify to receive whole milk. Once they reach the age of two, their benefit for milk switches to 1% or less fat, based on recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics. Parents don’t agree at times with the recommendation. Their thoughts are that their child should be drinking whole milk, which is why we share important nutritional information during the class.”
The classes are free and are advertised by fliers and on the agency’s Facebook page. They are held for an hour in the early afternoon and have a maximum of five participants, which allows for lots of individual attention. Approximately 40 clients have attended.
In surveys of participants taken before each class, families said they averaged three or four family meals at home per week. Surveys taken about a week after each class show that the participants are contemplating more healthy choices. Many report they have more ideas for what to cook at home, especially now that they have a crock pot, and a lot of the meals they are preparing use WIC ingredients. They also want to use more WIC ingredients to decrease the overall cost of meals. Three quarters of the participants said they are more likely to cook at home.
“People are still relying on a lot of on-the-go meals which are not nutrition based,” observes Tammy, “but we’re seeing more families making healthy choices now!”