Knowledge levels of nutrition of the cooks

It is very important that cooks have to have sufficient knowledge on the art of gourment and the art of kitchen as well as dietary, food preparation, food cooking and food conservation for health consumers that use collective dietary system.This research was planned and conducted in order to evaluate knowledge levels of cooks about nutrition. 122 cooks chosen by means of random sampling technique among the cooks working in Istanbul participated in the research. To determine cooks knowledge of nutritional level, we used healthy nutritional practices form developed by researcher. T-test, one way anova test, chi-square test and Kruskal Wallis test were used to evaluate the obtained data. The lowest significance level was accepted as p<0.05.Of 122 people participating in the research, 89.3% were male while 10.7% were female. It was determined that 37.7% of the research participants were in the age group of 27-33, 63.1% were married and 37.7% were in the monthly income group of 1200 TL and less 19.7% of the research participant staff are primary education graduate, 23.8% are secondary education graduate, 37.6% are high school graduate and 18.9% are university graduates. It was seen that 74.6% of them did not receive cookery education while 25.4% received cookery education.It was found that average scores of the cooks they took from the answers they gave to the expressions about the tasks of nutritional elements (5.9±1.18, p<0.05), sources of nutritional elements (8.4±0.99, p<0.05) and principles of preparing and cooking food (6.3±1.29, p<0.05) are higher and significantly different (p<0.05) among university/college graduates compared to the cooks in other educational levels. It was also found that the scores taken from these chapters fall as the age increases and these scores increase in accordance with receiving nutrition education. It was determined that average scores cooks took from the answers they gave to the expressions about healthy nutrition are higher among the cooks receiving cookery education, compared to those not receiving cookery education; and the difference between these two groups is statistically significant (p<0.05).It is suggested to provide kitchen staff with in-service training through the collaboration of business organizations and universities, to try to make up the deficiencies, and to repeat the education at certain intervals.Key words: Kitchen, cook, nutrition knowledge level