A B.C. wide contest is back in it’s ninth year promoting families eating and cooking together.
The Hands-On Cook-Off Contest is an initiative of Better Together BC, which exists to promote and support families eating together. The objective is to make and submit a three-minute video showing how to prepare a recipe in one of two categories. The multigenerational category must show at least two generations making a recipe together and the youth category must include two youth under age 18 preparing a recipe.
Any B.C. resident can enter until May 16.
Co-creator of the Hands-On Cook-Off contest and BC Dairy Association’s director of nutrition education, Sydney Massey, said there are many benefits of eating and cooking together as a family that carry on through generations.
“It supports people in so many ways like social development, better performances at school and I think people instinctively value eating together,” Massey said.
Research from the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behaviour found that people who ate together more often as teenagers are now bringing that habit along as adults in their new family.
“If you ate more family meals as a teenager, you’re new habit in you’re new family is that you have an expectation for people to be home for dinner,” Massey said. “It’s carrying forward in the generations, it’s very exiting research. Parents who do this today for their kids are kind of ensuring good habits for their grandchildren.”
In addition, Massey said research shows that youth who eat at the dinner table with their families typically are healthier in key nutritional areas.
“Researchers along the way have often looked at some of the key problem areas in [children’s] diet and eating enough fruits and vegetables is one of those problem areas,” Massey said. “The families that are eating together, more often those children are doing better in all of those key nutrition areas.”
For busy families, Massey says it’s all about taking baby steps towards eating and preparing meals together more frequently.
“I frankly think that it’s when people over idealize what [meals] are supposed to look like, that it stands in the way of taking that first step,” she said. “It’s not all about the perfection, it’s about letting people participate and eventually the benefits come.”
She suggest preparing homemade pizzas or tacos as an easy meal to begin with and to gradually work your way up to more in-depth recipes.
“It might at the beginning be chaos and a lot of mess because when little kids are involved it’s going to be messy, but that’s the pleasure and fun so you just kind of have to let it go and let them enjoy it and the pay off eventually comes,” Massey said.
Video entries will be judged by a panel of experts who will determine a grand prize winner and a runner up winner in each category. Videos with the most votes will win the people’s choice prize in its category. Prizes range from $150 to $1,000.
For full contest rules and to view previous years’ videos, visit www.bettertogetherbc.ca.