The National Institutes of Health spent $30,000 on a conference dedicated to researching a "novel" practice: teaching people how to cook.

The government lent its support to the "inaugural 2018 Research Day on Teaching Kitchens and Related Self Care Practices" held by the Culinary Institute of America and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health this February.

A "teaching kitchen" is essentially a home economics course, but with an added dose of mindfulness and "health coaching."

The NIH awarded $30,000 to the conference, which featured a presentation by the "Director of Food" at Google, calling the idea of learning how to cook a "young and emerging field."

"This will be the first conference co-sponsored by the CIA and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, both of which have jointly established the Teaching Kitchen Collaborative (TKC), an organization with 32 member organizations in the U.S., Italy, and Japan, each of which has developed a ‘teaching kitchen' program," the federal grant states.

"This inaugural conference is motivated by the need to develop an evidence-base for the field of ‘teaching kitchens'—a young and emerging field which has not yet been subjected to formal research," according to the grant.

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