After decades of cooking are you tired of cooking and find yourself eating toast for many meals? Perhaps your spouse or partner has died, and you struggle to cook regular meals for yourself? Joining a cooking class with people in the above or similar circumstances, while learning some easy, cheap but healthy cooking tips and tricks sounds like a winning recipe. The New Zealand Nutrition Foundation (NZNF) offers free sessions in local communities across New Zealand. Each session includes morning tea and lunch that you have prepared and the opportunity to chat with new friends.
NZNF is a professional, non-profit organisation founded in 1980. They work in partnership with other charities, businesses, community groups and cultural organisations (e.g. Māori and Pacific Islands groups) to especially help older New Zealanders living in the community to eat well, which directly improves health and wellbeing.
This happens through qualified and culturally experienced staff using programmes designed to build skills (nutrition knowledge, cooking and budgeting); improve health and social outcomes, and decrease the risk of malnutrition from not eating enough of the foods required for our ageing body and mind to be as healthy as possible.
JUST COOK Healthy Ageing for older people
The JUST COOK Healthy Ageing programme is aimed at the often-overlooked older people caring for themselves in the community, but who have lost motivation and/or the ability to cook well for themselves, and who, with today’s high prices for fresh produce, may no longer have access to the foods they used to cook and eat. The programme builds cooking skills, motivation, and confidence to cook, increases nutrition knowledge and builds social connection.
The four-session programme (3 hours each) has proven hugely beneficial for older people and is well appreciated by them, inclusive of those who:
- Do not have practical cooking skills (perhaps because their partner always cooked).
- Have lost their motivation to cook through illness, the loss of a partner, or tiredness.
- Need a boost of confidence to cook for themselves and/or to cook with different foods.
- Are suffering health consequences because of not cooking or eating enough.
The FREE programme teaches participants to plan and cook simple, healthy meals for one or two people, plus shopping tips, label-reading, and time-saving strategies. It encourages social connection, with participants eating morning tea and lunch together.
The key ingredients
Maintaining a healthy body weight into older age helps prevent long-term illnesses and disability, it is a key for living independently as we age. Yet amongst older people living independently across New Zealand, the risk of malnutrition is between 31 and 49%.