Park Center Senior High School students take part in Hmong cooking experience

Park Center Senior High School’s Hmong teachers, Yer Syhaphom and Chayeng Yang, recently applied for and received a District 279 Foundation grant to provide a series of Hmong cooking experiences for their students. A professional chef, Dyane Garvey, came to the Hmong classes each day the week of March 31 to explore Hmong cooking with the students. 

Some of the activities that took place during the weeklong experience included learning about the eight types of flavors prominent in Hmong foods and taste testing each, adjectives to describe flavors in Hmong, and learning about and sampling Hmong desserts that would traditionally be made for celebrations. Students worked to pound foods the traditional way using mortar and pestle as they learned about traditional Hmong cooking methods compared with more modern methods. 

Garvey explained that traditionally, Hmong people are vegetarians and only eat meat on special occasions. Their traditional methods of cooking are different from what many of today’s young Hmong people in America learn, which is often more of a fusion of different cultures’ foods and more modern cooking methods. But in traditional Hmong cooking, she said it takes all day to pound some of the ingredients, and the whole community gets involved in the physical labor of cooking meals. 

“Chronic illness is really high in the Hmong community, and it’s because we are eating less and less vegetables,” Garvey said. “This experience is my way of educating students about traditional foods in the hopes that it will interest them in eating more healthy, traditional Hmong food. To do that, they need to know and understand the traditional flavors.”

April is Hmong Heritage Month, where Osseo Area Schools joins the nation in honoring the Hmong people and commemorating the arrival of the first Hmong families in the mid-1970s. More than 170,000 Hmong people live in the United States today, and Minnesota specifically is now home to the largest concentration of Hmong people in the nation.