Overtown Cookbook crew gets visit from Jamie Oliver

Chef and food activist Jamie Oliver visited Booker T. Washington Senior High School Feb. 25 to meet with students and the creators of the Overtown Cookbook, a collaborative project between the high school and FIU’s Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, School of Hospitality and Tourism Management and Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work. Oliver toured the culinary lab and vegetable garden on the Booker T. Washington campus and talked with students about their challenges with healthy eating.

The cookbook has been made possible thanks to support from the Miami Foundation. It features healthy versions of traditional African-American and Caribbean recipes and is an ongoing project of the Historic Overtown Public Health Empowerment (HOPE) Collaborative, an FIU-community partnership that promotes health and empowerment. As part of the project, students from Booker T. Washington bring recipes from home and learn how to change the recipes to make them healthier.