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Dan Clapson has no doubt that university students can think for themselves. His Kick the KD program is more concerned with making sure they can feed themselves.

Rightly or wrongly, university students have been stigmatized as having poor eating habits and minimal cooking skills. This, we are told, is part of the reason the teen to 20-something crowd is a prime target for cheap convenience foods like Kraft Dinner.

It is also a large part of the reason Calgary food blogger Dan Clapson (dansgoodside.com) has launched Kick the KD, an initiative aimed at teaching basic cooking skills to University of Calgary students. Inspired by Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and armed with his own pots, pans, knives, and a belief that everyone should be able to feed themselves well, Clapson is prepared to commit all his spare time to the cause (his day job is managing Higher Ground in Kensington)—for the next 10 weeks, anyway.

It’s a daunting task, and one that pits Clapson against the proliferation of takeout (gourmet and not) and packaged meals (finished or not) that appear to make life easier. His goal is to teach participants that true convenience is not the accessibility of prepared food at the corner store, but rather the ability to work with what you have  on hand, to turn the sparse contents of your fridge into something edible.

Clapson hopes the program will spread to other schools and other cities, inspiring more students with limited funds and shared residence kitchens to learn about and appreciate the good side of food. If his experience setting up Kick the KD is any indication, there is a demand for this sort of program. After inspiration struck, Clapson refined the idea (one of many; he calls himself “spastically creative”), put the word out and received almost 100 applications from the culinarily challenged for the 15 available spots. Clapson chose those whom he felt were most enthusiastic and who needed the most help, from a young anthropology major to a CJSW radio DJ working on her thesis. Clapson’s favourite application came from a student who had used a Star Trek cookbook to make a “Klingon bloodworm” dish and failed miserably.

Naween Mohammed, a second-year business student, made the cut. “I want to be able to depend on myself,” she said when I asked about her motivation for joining Kick the KD. “When I open the fridge and it looks like there’s nothing in there—nothing looks edible—I want to be able to make something.”

Teaching culinary self-reliance is what drives Clapson. He believes everyone should possess basic cooking skills, or at least have access to someone willing to teach them. Clapson sees value in the experience for himself as well, so every Thursday night you’ll find him teaching his group of food fans how to cook—hands-on— in the upstairs kitchen of the Calgary Co-op Midtown Market. (Co-op donated the space and ingredients for the class to cook with.)

Perhaps the coolest part of this story is that Clapson has never done anything like it before and is figuring out how to pull this project off as he goes along. One of his recent tweets—“If the world’s my oyster, then shuck it”—suggests that there have been a few bumps along the way.

Before Kick the KD began, Clapson met with each participant to assess their skill levels, confirm their commitment and learn their expectations of the process. Each week he’s planned a new angle, a twist on the main theme, namely, that cooking is not as hard as it seems. Besides basic knife and other culinary skills, Clapson also plans field trips downstairs to cover the basics of shopping, showing students how to choose produce, identify cuts of meat and read a nutrition label—all valuable information that’s not included in the U of C curriculum.

He’s even assigning homework. Clapson plans to send students home with recipes they must whip up in their own kitchens. Photographs of their finished meals will be submitted for evaluation, and they’ll talk about their home experiences in class.

Clapson is also tapping the Internet and social media by pairing each participant with a food blogger who will act as a mentor of sorts. The experienced hands will offer the kitchen rookies online inspiration and culinary support as needed (it’s sort of like picking up the phone and calling your mom).

Clapson hopes the online nurturing of his brood of new cooks will continue past the 10 weeks they’re in his care. And he’s really hoping his first 15 students will pass on what they’ve learned to their friends. Perhaps a dinner party or two would do the trick.