Food & Wine By Kay Ledger Nationally renowned cookbook author, chef and restaurateur Su-Mei Yu is sharing her considerable passion for cooking and living a healthy lifestyle with children. She recently started a cooking school called The Prem Organic Cooking Academy, which opened in January 2008 in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Yu recently talked about the school in an interview on “Asia Talk Radio” with ASIA co-publishers Leonard Novarro and Rosalynn Carmen.  Yu founded the cooking academy in association with the Prem Tinsulanonda Center for International Education, which serves children ages 9 to 16 from all over the world, many of them from Southeast Asia and South Asia.  The school places students into an organic garden where they pick the herbs, fruits and vegetables they’ll later learn to cook. Academy organizers aim to reconnect modern kids with the rhythms of the garden and kitchen, based on what Yu describes as seasonal ‘cycles of produce’ grown in traditional Thai kitchen gardens.   Cookbook author wants to put kids back on the farm, and cooking                                                     “We work out recipes based on what is out there in the garden,” she explained. The kids “start out early in the morning. They go to the farm, they pick the vegetables based on the recipes. They bring them back, and they have to wash them and taste them before they’re cooked.” Cooking takes place in a large pavilion open to the out of doors. Meals are prepared from scratch, using simple equipment. “They don’t use machines,” said Yu. “If they’re going to make coconut milk, we teach them how to crack open the coconut, how to grate it, how to milk it. They have to pound their spices. They do everything,” including setting the table.  The garden-to-table experience can be transformative, said Yu, especially for kids who have never so much as peeled a banana. “We are talking about children brought up in very wealthy households where they have never seen the kitchen. “They have never cut anything, they have never peeled anything. They just sit at the table and food is brought to them.”  But, everyone pitches in at the cooking academy, and students come away with a visceral understanding of where their food comes from. They “realize once you pick the vegetable, it can end up on the plate,” said Yu. “They wash the dishes and take whatever is left back to the farm and turn it into compost. What happens is these kids become kind of starry eyed to see that what they ate did come from the earth, and they are so proud of the fact they could produce something.”  Yu hopes to begin a similar program for children in the San Diego area soon.