Tanya Whitehouse

Professional Profile

lifetime of personal and professional twists and turns prepared Chef Tanya Whitehouse for her position as Chef and Program Manager for The Food Connection at the University of Kentucky where she has managed the learning kitchen since 2016. Growing up hanging out in a Cooperative Extension Service office, she easily started collaborating with Extension education professionals until it became one of the pillars of her work. As the former Sous Chef of Holly Hill Inn for Ouita Michel, she brings both her culinary expertise and a lifelong passion for Kentucky-grown foods to her cooking classes and trainings. Tanya uses cooking demonstrations and hands-on cooking classes to highlight all the hard work The Food Connection team does to bring more local foods to our tables, emphasize the importance of supporting local farms and farmers, and the reasons why we should invest more attention and resources in our local food system. Within the Cooperative Extension Service work with Family and Consumer Sciences and the Kentucky Nutrition Education Program, she is driven by her desire for more people to have the skills to make their own nutritious, local, seasonal food and increase their nutrition security. More than anything Chef T loves to see people try and learn to love different foods, the pride participants take in mastering new culinary skills, and getting to talk about and play with delicious local food all day.