Vegetarian Culinary Schools

Vegetarian Culinary Schools focus on the healthier side of cooking. Vegetarians avoid food items like meat, poultry, fish, etc., that do not originate from plants but from other live species. Majority of them do not consume other products and by-products from animal sources, such as eggs, leather, wool, and silk. Some of them go to the extreme level of shunning even items like honey and dairy products, as well as soaps and cosmetics produced with chemicals derived from animal sources. These people are termed as vegans.

If a person wishes to become an expert in the vegetarian culinary dishes preparation, choosing pure vegetarian culinary schools becomes important. Only a few schools and institutes offer programs or training in vegetarian cooking. These vegetarian culinary schools focus mainly on organic cooking techniques, with an emphasis on whole food items or raw food diet. The selection of food items are based on cooking styles based on vegetarian and vegan systems. If you are interested in becoming a specialist in preparation of vegetarian cuisine, you should select an institution from the vegetarian culinary schools. On the other hand, achieving professionalism as a vegan chef is much more difficult, since very few schools provide accredited and certified vegan chef programs. 

One of the vegetarian culinary schools is Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts, established in 1977. The institute started the Chef’s Training Program to help persons aspiring to become pure vegetarian chefs. This program helps the students not only in the preparation of delicious and beautiful, health-supporting vegetarian cuisine but also focuses on helping them pursue careers in restaurants, bakeries, health spas, catering, private cooking, food writing, teaching, and consulting in the field of vegetarian cooking. 

The program fee for full-time students is $22,980 and it is $21,980 for part-time students. However, the institute provides career training student loan from SLM Corp. to eligible students. Students are allowed to borrow the total tuition fees and housing expenses, with repayment options ranging from 1 year to 15 years at variable interest rates. Additionally, the Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts conducts cooking classes and special lectures to teach the general public about health-supportive food preparation based on vegetarianism. 

Among the other vegetarian schools, The School of Natural Cookery started as a school offering cooking courses to home cooks in 1983 and the curriculum for professional chefs became functional in 1991. In 2005, the curriculum of the school expanded with the addition of energetic nutrition, protein focus course, and wine paring. This division was named as The Professional School of Natural Cookery. The programs include a foundation course, training for personal chef, and a teacher training program. The foundation course costs about $14,895, the personal chef program costs around $3,800, and the teacher training course is priced at $3,600.

Another institution in the vegetarian culinary schools model is The Natural Epicurean, conducting an 800-hour culinary training program in vegetarian, vegan, and macrobiotic cooking. The institution imparts knowledge in all relevant areas of natural foods that include food energetics, home processing, vegetarian and vegan cooking, cooking for healing diets, seasonal cooking for optimal health, home remedies, and basic Oriental diagnosis. A few other institutions also specialize as vegetarian culinary schools and train people in vegetarian, as well as vegan cooking but most of them do not have accredited programs. 

Not Only Vegetarian Culinary Schools - Find the Best Culinary Arts Schools