Backcountry Cooking - Turning Cornell Students Into Outdoor Gourmet Chefs

Audience: Cornell Undergraduate and Graduate students. 

Responsibilities: Learning Experience Design, public speaking, facilitation, collaboration.

Tools Used: Backcountry cooking equipment, Google Drive.

Overview

I and two other Cornell Outdoor Education instructors led a backcountry cooking learning experience over four weeks for eight Cornell Undergraduate and Graduate students. One of the biggest reasons many people don’t enjoy camping is the terrible food you have while outdoors. Anyone who has eaten a Backpackers Pantry, Pad Thai meal, knows it should really be called Sad Thai.

Our goal was to leave students with a greater appreciation for the outdoors, and inspire them to spend more time camping through teaching them one of the core camping skills: cooking. Aside from class ratings, the major way we knew if we had achieved this was if they could successfully cook a meal for another Cornell Outdoor Education class—Geocaching—by the third week of the course.

Over four weeks we taught the students core backcountry cooking skills including, knife safety, stove safety, leave no trace, food storage, planning, and basic cooking, as well as how to collaborate with others to make a meal. In our class ratings at the end we received the first straight 10 score rating across the board ever in a backcountry cooking class at Cornell Outdoor Education. The Geocaching team described our meal as “superb.”

The Final Course Implementation

Week 1

We taught the students knife and stove safety, as well as the basics cooking skills like sautéing, dicing, chopping, and searing. We made sure to divvy up the teaching to all instructors to create an equal power dynamic. For each activity we included stories to add emotional glue to the student learnings.

Following Gagne‘s nine events of instruction we made sure to start teaching the skill ourselves, then allowed students to give it a try with proper instructor guidance. After the cooking we split into different groups depending on the activity students wanted to do. Some students wanted to walk while others wanted to make friendship bracelets.

Here are some pictures of our cooking:

Week 2

We taught students leave no trace, how to plan a backpacking trip, and food safety. Here are some pictures of the cooking:

Week 3

This was the big week! We drove out to Watkin’s Glen and had the students cook a big homemade burrito meal for another class at Cornell Outdoor Education: Geocaching.

By gamifying the experience in this way, students were more motivated to learn in the beginning weeks. Cooking a terrible meal for oneself is one thing—cooking a bad meal for someone else is another. Combining the two groups like that led to interesting cross class conversations.

Here are some photos of the cooking:

Week 4

The last week we led the students in an overnight at Fox Fire lean two. Because it was the last class we allowed them to lead all the cooking activities as well as have more control over the activities we did between cooking. The overnight is an entirely different experience compared to just cooking during the day. Many of the students reported after class it was where they truly fell in love with the outdoor experience.

Here are some pictures of the night:

Overall, we believe the class was successful because of the students’ ability to cook for another class during week three and on their own during week four. In addition, we received the first straight 10 score rating across the board ever in a backcountry cooking class at Cornell Outdoor Education.