Chris Jess teaches Hospitality and Tourism at Centre Wellington District High School – but he refers to his class as “The Food School.”
A chef for 15 years, Jess has the same ambivalent attitude about recipes as he does to scholastic tags – he is not fanatical about following them.
“I am not a fan of recipes,” he said bluntly. “I want my students to look through a recipe and understand what is happening.”
It is an unusual approach for a chef who turned into a teacher, but Jess is building a huge fan base at the local high school. He started teaching there last year with 75 students. This year his classes have 150. Word of mouth did that.
He likens following recipes to watching TV. Both are “passive” and Jess wants his student to “develop the ability to develop their senses.”
He cited that hoary old example of “our daily bread.” His students make it, from scratch, but the recipe is not that important; it is how they go about making that loaf that teaches about food. He told them bread makers should knead their bread until it feels like the lobe of their ear.
“Bread and their earlobe will stick with them far longer than a recipe of six steps,” he said.
Another famous chef, Jamie Oliver, has noted that Martha Stewart became a multimillionaire by teaching people all of their grandmother’s homemaking secrets. Jess can identify with that sentiment. When he tired of kitchen politics and decided to teach his skills, instead of having Tuesdays off from his job for the rest of his working life, he looked to the past. While he was learning to be a teacher in Hamilton, he stayed with his grandmother, Rosa Nykamp, 80, and he ran into a conundrum with her. She refused to allow him, a professional chef, do any cooking. that was her job.
So he sat and watched how she did it, and the result was a cookbook collaboration between them. How many chefs, or teachers for that matter, co-author any book with their grandma?
Jess takes what might seem to some to be an unconventional approach to other parts of his teaching career.
For him, “I teach all food, all the time,” he said, musing about whether there will be enough restaurants in Centre Wellington to hire all the cooks he plans to produce from school.
Of course, those cooks will have old time skills. Instead of food processors and can openers, they will be using knives. He has one 14-year-old student who is better than any of his fourth year students when it comes to preparing food the old fashioned way – with a razor sharp knife.
They might be skills of his grandmother, but Jess said, “I’m geared up to preserving some of those skills.”
And preserving is just what the class is learning to do. An old fashioned pantry is adjacent to his classroom. He teaches how to make preserves, and students can even make their own catsup in his classes. He also smokes his own meats at school.
“I have great pride the school smells like hickory,” he said with a smile. It is all part of his teaching methods.
“I’m adamant that they understand what food is,” he said. “I pride myself that my kitchen is devoid of labels they would see as food. We create food that we label.”
Jess is aware that teaching a class of students gives him some advantages that chefs hidden away in commercial kitchens do not have. Take shucking corn, for example. Professional chefs would have to designate people for a full day’s duty cleaning fresh corn – which might explain why many places provide canned corn instead. But with 150 students doing 80 hours of instruction over the course of a semester, that chore can easily be completed quickly, leaving fresh corn available for use.
“I love that I can teach things that are practical,” he said, even while admitting that, like teachers in other classes, “some of [the students] aren’t with you. They’re zoned out.”
But, “I love giving students skills.”
He said of academia, students “are not getting hands-on skills. We’ve put pressure on my generation to be academic successes. They’re unable to apply it in a real way. For example, they can’t fix a car or build a house. We’ve built consumers. They can make $100,000 a year but can’t balance a cheque book – or make lunch. A good scientist should also be a good soup maker.”
Saving farms
For Jess, having students learn about food is about much more than honing their kitchen skills along with their knives.
For one thing, he would like to see less waste of food. He cited Hamilton as a good example, where there are all kinds of fruit trees growing in people’s back yards, and every year, 17,000 tons of newly grown food goes to waste – for the simple reason people today simply do not know what to do with it. It is high time this generation thinks back to the days of grandpa’s farm, and noted that during a recession, “This is a perfect time to talk about thrift in the economy. We need to sit down – and eat.”
Jess said, “As a chef, I’m concerned about the food being grown.” Consumers even ought to be able to tell farmers what to feed their stock. He is not thinking of chemicals and growth hormones, either.
But he, like everyone else, is seeing more and more factory style farms, and fewer farming operations run by people like those of two generations ago. The modern method he sees “is not farming, in my opinion. It’s chemical management. I talk to older farmers all the time. There’s no satisfaction left. I want to change that.”
He hopes to do that from a classroom. His idea is to get students as enthused about producing food as they have been about smoking, preserving and cooking it in his classroom.
“My big project right now is to grow it in school,” he said. “The average age of farmers right now is 60. I look around and I don’t see anyone lining up to be a farmer … We need to get our youth enthused about farming.”
He knows some of the younger generation is taking on that challenging career, and he supports them by buying their produce. A couple in their 20s near Neustadt produce organic meats and he is a customer. He said they are smart marketers .
Economics of food
Jess is well aware that there are difficulties in the economics of farming.
He said it boils down to teaching students to understand the value of food, as opposed to much of the junk they are constantly exposed to. He cited packaged cookies in the school’s cafeteria from a mega company, which cost students $1 for four, while a single, class-made cookie is $1.75.
But he is convinced students are smarter than the factory farm companies think, and they can taste the difference from foods made with real ingredients, and those made with chemicals.
“As an activist, I can take on those things,” he said. “By showing the alternatives, I can win the argument. I win the argument when you taste my food.”
Jess is an activist. He is a leader in the slow food movement for proper preparation of real food instead of stuff that comes from packages, boxes and tins. But, he said, it is not easy. He knows someone who raises turkeys in a healthy outdoor environment. Someone reported that farmer to the SPCA for cruelty, feeling the turkeys should be protected from wet weather.
But Jess is convinced the tide of pre-packaged food days may be turning. He said today, “We want to be fed well.”
At the point of purchase, people are asking questions. He said there are difficulties with generations of urbanites, in particular, being raised to want a $2 hamburger. “That doesn’t take into account it costs $8,” he said, implying the difference means the seller will start cutting corners. He noted at the school, the class makes its own buns, catsup and relish, but, “Adults feel it is their right to a $2 burger. I really challenge them.
“I’m not afraid to charge what food is worth. We use butter and we use cream. These things cost money.”
Raising all the food
Jess would like to expand the food chain at the high school. He buys his produce at local farmers’ markets (the interview took place at a farmers’ market).
Currently, he is looking to expand his supply system by having students raise their own food – from crops to livestock. He estimated it would take about three acres of land, and he is hoping someone near the school would be willing to donate that land for the cause.
“Some livestock, but not a lot,” he said. “I want to show our food walking in across the parking lot.” He said he would “love one day” to be able to grow all the classes’ food, from fruit and vegetables to pork, beef and chicken.
“Raise the pigs; butcher, put it in the pan and then eat it. It’s a cycle that’s so amazing. No text book can teach that.”
He said a little wistfully, “ If I can train one child to become a farmer … ”
