CookShop for Teens: EATWISE

New York City's low-income neighborhoods suffer from a high incidence of diet-related diseases such as diabetes, obesity and hypertension — resulting largely from a diet high in fat, calories and sodium. In these neighborhoods, a lack of healthy food sources combined with an overabundance of inexpensive, low-quality food options makes healthy lifestyles difficult at best. To address these issues, the Food Bank's suite of CookShop Programs encourages the development of healthy diets while helping participants meet challenges to healthy living.

EATWISE (Educated and Aware Teens Who Inspire Smart Eating), our CookShop program for teens, is a nutrition-education program that focuses on empowering New York City high school and early college students from low-income communities to raise awareness for food and nutrition among peers to work toward increasing access to healthy food in low-income neighborhoods. Over the summer months, the program provides participants with a series of hands-on workshops, field trips and opportunities to educate other youth about making healthy food choices.

After completing the summer curriculum, our participants are equipped to act as peer educators at their schools, where they can organize and lead student chapters as well as provide nutrition and food presentations at their schools — helping EATWISE reach approximately 2,000 New York City students. These EATWISE chapters also create their own projects, which enable them to connect with other youth working with food issues in the city. The activity of these chapters also sparks a viral awareness-raising system by which the peers they encounter take the EATWISE message to their friends and families, spreading the word throughout low-income neighborhoods and beyond.

EATWISE chapter activities have included neighborhood surveys on the availability of nutritious food, smoothie sales and peer nutrition-education workshops. Active EATWISE participants are also given access to an interactive website, www.eatwise.us, which allows them to post questions and events of their own as well as access recipes, resources for healthy food and information on what other EATWISE groups are doing. Information is also posted on this site by Food Bank staff.

If you are interested in starting an EATWISE chapter or would like more information about EATWISE chapters, you can find more information here:

Fact Sheet  Chapter Application  Chapter FAQs 

To become involved in or learn more about EATWISE, contact Triada Stampas, Director of Government Relations & Public Education.