According to a national survey of secondary family and consumer sciences programs the enrollment in a Home Economics class or Family and Consumer sciences class has gone down to 38% fewer enrolled over the past 10 years.  This means that less students are receiving the opportunity to learn basic life skills such as food safety, cooking skills, recipe reading and meal planning. Basic life skills such as cooking techniques, food safety and meal planning should be taught at an early age in order for those skills to be beneficial as adult. According the Center for Disease Control and Prevention more than one third of children and adolescents were overweight or obese. Super Star Chef is a University of Kentucky Cooperative Extension Program that was presented in Muhlenberg County for youth to participate in.

The Super Star Chef program identified basic cooking skills, food safety techniques and nutrition as the main points to address. The program was a partnership with traveling college students presenting the information, Nutrition Education Program, and the Family and Consumer Sciences agent. This program was offered to 4^th-12^th grade students during summer break. This program encouraged team work, decision making, planning, nutrition education and food preparation. During the program the participants were taught about basic knife skills, kitchen lingo, kitchen equipment, MyPlate information, and the process of growing food.

At the beginning of the program and again at the end of the program participants were evaluated to reflect what skills and knowledge was gained during the program. Overall, pre-post comparisons of participant responses to the assessment instrument show that the program enhanced participant understanding of the nutrition concepts covered in the program. When all 11 participants were evaluated greater than 90% of the participants could recognize dairy, grains, and fruits as food groups on the MyPlate. 100% of participants answered that they know the correct way of holding a knife. Understanding food labels and nutritional information can be a challenging task, because of the Super Star Chef program 100% of the participants can compare calories on a beverage nutrition label and can compare fats in a beverage on the nutrition label.