Melissa Ellis

Melissa Ellis at Bellflower Unified School in LA is teaching the 10 Skills education program as part of her mental and behavioural health course. We caught up with her and a few of her students in 10th to 12th grade – Jerome, Sam, Kevin, Edward, Valeria and Kenny.

TO THE STUDENTS…

You’ve been doing Ministry Of Food classes – do you have a favourite recipe?

“I would have to say the summer rolls, because of the different spices and different vegetables we used. Like it was pretty unique, especially the sauce. It’s good with the spicy oil with peanut butter.”

“My favorite was the tomatok soup and soda bread. I have made it like three times since at home. It was nice to see how using a lot of canned ingredients and easy stuff to get at the store could still make a really nutritious meal.”

“I really liked the tomato spaghetti we made recently. It's pretty good and didn't need too many unhealthy ingredients. I’m planning to make it at home.”

How has doing the MOF classes inspired you?

“It’s helping me choose healthier options, helping me with my diet, and my overall connection with food. We’re learning that cooking is more than just stuff you eat. When we made the spaghetti, the teacher gave us a lot of tips and facts about how food fuels your body and your brain. I'm gonna take that into when I cook with my mom – I’ll tell her what’s good for her and what isn’t!”

“I've been inspired because it made me realize how it's actually really easy to cook with simple ingredients and be healthy, because I thought that cooking would be much harder. But I realized that I could use canned ingredients and combine them with fresh ingredients and cook really good and healthy meals.”

What do you guys think of Jamie?

“I think he has, like, the kindest place in his heart for making sure everyone's healthy. He’s so passionate about helping people to live healthier, happier lives with these recipes.”

“I’m really into the culinary arts, so learning about Jamie has been really cool. A lot of culinary world stuff is almost pretentious, and Jamie really opens it up to everyday people, making it easier for people to stay healthy.”

TO MELISSA

How does the 10 Skills program work within what you do?

The course that I teach is counseling and mental health services and then the next course in the pathway is peer counseling. These students don't have a culinary background, but we do have psychology offered at our school as an elective. Our class is a CTE class, so career technical education, which we have lots of at our school. Paul teaches the Freight Farm class, we have an amazing aviation course, woodworking, auto, culinary,j and then my pathway is the mental behavioral sciences and medical. We go a lot into the neuroscience in my class, how certain neurotransmitters can be increased or decreased depending on what you eat. Coming out of the pandemic, it was important – and, I mean, it still is. We learned that 95% of serotonin is actually made in your gut and not in your brain – so ingredients can help with mood balancing or increasing your focus. So to answer your question about like, how do we embed this? It's in this section of the class. We learn about the mind/gut axes. And then it's kind of sprinkled throughout the semester and we keep connecting back to it.

The kids are really inspired by it, aren’t they?

Yes, absolutely. And their families talk about it all the time too. When I see them, the first thing they say is, “Oh my gosh, my kid is talking to me. They’re like telling me about what they did in class and normally they don’t talk about anything.” So that’s exciting. And I think the bigger thing is just getting these kids to be present, whether it’s, you know, cooking and hands-on stuff. Any of the career technical education courses help them to slow down and be present, and that’s improving their mental health too. In this day and age, when there’s just so much divisiveness in classes of people, poverty levels, politics, even gangs in this area, this is a way for them to connect. I think a lot of times, we’ll focus on these existential things, like the climate crisis, when we need to start right in your home, start there being healthy and connected. We’re like our own little family here, because a lot of my students don't necessarily have a good home or a home at all, or I have foster students or homeless students, or the only meal they get in the day is when they come to school. And I can see an improvement in their mood and they’re so engaged. It also means when my seniors go off to college, they’re like, “Wow, I could cook this when I move out.” Or they cook for their family. Food is a common denominator. It’s the one thing we have in common, regardless of where you come from or what you look like. We all love and need to eat.

Have you found it brought everybody together in a way that they haven't been before?

Yes. The demographic of our school is 75%-80% Latino, and 15-20% Black. There’s 5% or less of White and Asian. Then there's a lot of classes in between. It’s predominantly a lower income/lower socioeconomic school, and everyone does come together. Everyone helps each other and it doesn’t matter where they’re from, what street they live on, it’s nice to see them working together and having fun. I have one student in particular who has oppositional defiant disorder and his grandma and teachers have both told me how they’re seeing a difference in him after my class. All he knows is that his parents are incarcerated and that could be his future if he joins the same gang. But he’s bringing ingredients home from class, and he's given plates of the spaghetti and tomato sauce that he made to his teachers, and they’re like so excited because he's excited. It's pretty cool to see the growth and just the interest in life again.

What has the feedback been from the students?

Feedback from the students has all been positive. They're like, “When's the next time we're gonna do a Jamie Oliver recipe?” They're excited to learn about the ingredients and being able to learn stuff and take those skills home. Whenever we start cooking, it feels like every teacher or security guard who passes by pops in and says, “Ooh, what are you guys doing? It smells so good!” So they wander in and get to sample the food, then they start asking questions, and before you know it they’re taking home a Ministry Of Food recipe. The spirit is just incredible. I think most people don’t know that what they’re putting in their body is affecting their ability to sleep or concentrate or just be healthy. It’s mental health awareness month in May, when we’ll be having a little booth all about good food. Then later in the school year, the students are going to the elementary school down the street to explain it to them, with some Jamie Oliver recipes and do a little sample session.

So the school has been really supportive of it?

Yes, absolutely. Because I’m not a culinary arts teacher, I cook out in our garden. We have a little pizza oven, so we make pizzas, or we make things that don’t need an oven, like the summer rolls. We’ve even done the veggie fajitas and stir-fries out in the garden, which we made on a little stove.

Do you find it pretty easy to integrate it into your curriculum?

For myself? Yes, but I have the luxury of not having to adhere to state standardized testing, because it's an elective course – other teachers are more crunched for time, so that would be more difficult. But I think this would go well in any kind of mental or behavior health courses, or also any middle-school course. At high-school level, a health course would be great to integrate that in. They’re talking about bringing in a financial literacy and life skills course as a requirement in the state of California, but that hasn't happened yet. It would even work in our world languages courses – I think they would really like to do an Italian Jamie Oliver recipe – or environmental science.

How popular is Jamie in America?

For the younger crowd, he’s not that well known. I had to tell my class that he’s the voice of the health inspector from Ratatouille, then they loved him!

We’ve come so far from knowing what’s on our plate and how it gets there, it’s great that you’re teaching your students where food comes from and how to cook it yourself – food is being prioritised…

It really is. And the fact that Paul’s class (growing and gardening) and mine mesh really well. He knows all about the agricultural part and the knowledge about soil and the environment. Then my students have been growing stuff in the garden. Then we harvest those ingredients. They’re very invested in that, when they grew it themselves. Most of them live in apartments and don’t really leave them, a lot just don’t go outside at all. So all of this is exciting – to cook, to be outside, to grow things, to connect to where food comes from. Learning to cook is a skillset we need to be teaching to our kids.

How have you found the course?

It’s been a really wonderful experience, because the recipes are so simple, the students can do it themselves and I think they take a lot of pride in that. Then they taste it and they’re like, “Wow, this is good!” It's just simple, it’s everything you need to know, it’s a life skill. Students who’ve just graduated will talk about it, students who aren’t in my class anymore still talk about it. Around here, unless you have a car, you can’t get to a big supermarket. The kids get their food from liquor stores or gas stations. And what are you going to get there? It's just terrible food. The kids always talk about the tomato soup because they’ve never had tomato soup in their whole life, let alone the soda bread, and it’s something they could make. The tomato soup and the spaghetti and tomato sauce are their favorites.

You must feel so proud of your kids…

I feel very proud of them. I feel proud also because I know a lot of my students have that parental role in their families, so they go home and take care of their little brothers and sisters. And now they can give them quality food. We also talk about the importance of eating together. The very first few times we were cooking together in our culinary lab, the students were all cooking in their little stations, then I said, “OK, when you guys are done, come back to the center and let’s eat together, as a family.” And they all looked at me and I was like, “You don't eat with your family ever?” And every single student said they never eat with their family, they just take their food and eat it in their room. It’s just not a thing. And there’s so much research showing how important it is. So they all came in and we ate together as a family. We call ourselves the Buck Family, because we’re the Bellflower Buccaneers. After a few times of doing this, they now know that we’re all gonna come in and sit and eat together. And the conversations they have over that dinner… That was a very proud moment for me.

What was the first meal you were ever taught to cook?

Probably spaghetti and marinara sauce. My mother was Italian American, so I didn't really have any other kind of food except for Italian food growing up. Making the sauce and it taking a really long time was my first experience with food. And I still love Italian food.

How has delivering 10 Skills made you feel?

I feel so blessed to have the opportunity to bring Jamie Oliver recipes to my students. I love connecting information about brain chemistry, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), mental wellness and to always have hope in making a change because we have the gift of neuroplasticity with food. When we eat together and chat, sometimes I say, “This is what peace feels like”. Whether or not my students pursue a career in the culinary field doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that, through Jamie Oliver’s recipes, they experience the joy of being present, gain a valuable life skill in learning how to cook, and find a sense of peace – even if only for a little while. That, to me, is a true win!