American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults
Future Reflections Special Issue on Cooking PASSING IT FORWARD
From Fear to Passion: A Blind Chef’s Culinary Journey
by Cameron Loehr
From the Editor: It is all too common for sighted adults to discourage blind children from helping out in the kitchen. The blind child is likely to absorb the adults’ anxieties, concluding that the kitchen is a scary and dangerous place. In this article Cameron Loehr recounts how, with his father's help, he overcame his fears and developed a passion for cooking.
I'm an instructor in daily living skills at the Louisiana Center for the Blind in Ruston, Louisiana. One might find it hard to believe that I, who once feared the kitchen, now teach others the art of cooking.
Growing up as a blind child, I was seldom allowed to be in the kitchen. I was never asked to help out when my grandmother or my father cooked. Even when I reached my teens, they gently pushed me out of the kitchen or shooed me away from the grill. While everybody else was preparing food for family functions, I was sent off to supervise the younger children. Over time these experiences filled me with anxiety and fear about being in the kitchen, a place that was wholly unfamiliar to me.
Then, when I was sixteen, my dad realized I should learn to cook for myself so I'd be prepared when I eventually moved out on my own. That summer Dad spent nearly every evening instructing me on how to cook and introducing me to a variety of family recipes. I didn't enjoy it at first. I thought I had better things to do with my time.
Learning to cook was definitely not easy, and I made plenty of mistakes along the way. Once, when my dad was teaching me to make fried chicken, I mistook the powdered sugar for flour. The chicken certainly didn't taste right, and the sugar really didn't stick to it. My dad quickly figured out my mistake and laughed it off. That night we had sandwiches for dinner.
I discovered that I enjoyed cooking when other people enjoyed my food, so I kept going. A few years later I lost my dad to illness. Cooking became a way for me to honor his memory and preserve our family recipes.
When I was in my early twenties I started to lose my remaining vision. I needed to learn to cook entirely without vision. I enrolled at the Louisiana Center for the Blind (LCB) and completed intensive training in blindness skills. I regained the skills I'd previously learned when I had limited vision, and I built upon those skills using nonvisual methods.
My self-confidence soared as I recreated dishes I'd once made using my limited sight. I dove into cooking dishes I had never prepared when I had some usable vision. I even ventured into baking, an area that had always intimidated me. The first time I baked chocolate-chip cookies from scratch, I found that I could tell when they were done by checking their texture when they came out of the oven. Baking cookies was a huge confidence booster for me!
After I completed the training program at LCB, I knew that the cooking skills and dishes my dad had taught me would not disappear. I could continue to share those dishes with my family.
My passion for cooking grew as I began working as an instructor in daily living skills and when I became a parent. My child is now five, and she is also blind. Already I have begun getting my kid to help in the kitchen. Right now her jobs are to pour ingredients, throw away trash, mix stuff together, and cut up fruit if needed. My goal is for her to feel comfortable in the kitchen, for the kitchen to be the heart of the home. I want her never to know the feeling that the kitchen is a strange and scary place because it's unfamiliar to her. I want us to share the bond that I once had with my own father.
Cooking has become more than just a hobby for me. It is a way for me to connect with others, preserve traditions, and create lasting memories.