Inmate Trina McQueen doesn't know if chicken Parmesan and a romaine salad with Dijon vinaigrette will keep her off crack and out of jail, but the simple act of cooking a meal and eating it with her cell mates gives her hope.

Last week, she and 21 other women doing time at the San Francisco County Jail wrapped white restaurant aprons around their bright orange sweat suits and took the first of what will be weekly cooking classes taught by some of the Bay Area's top chefs. The fledgling project is the first of its kind in California, organizers said.

"It makes me remember the kind of things you feel around family," said McQueen, who has a 20-year-old daughter and a 13-year-old son. As she shredded carrots for the day's lunch, she described how she started using drugs and drinking three years ago, after what had been a long stretch of sobriety. She has been in and out of jail on a variety of charges since. The classes are taught without knives, of course. Food comes prepped, but tasks like whisking a salad dressing, sautéing chicken breasts and peeling potatoes are left for the inmates. And the chef-instructors, all of whom are from San Francisco's Jardinière and Acme Chophouse, have had to forgo wine-and-food pairings.

The idea to teach prisoners to cook came out of a volunteer effort called Nextcourse, started by a group of farmers, chefs, and environmental and public health workers.

Nextcourse was formed to help solve problems of obesity and inadequate nutrition among Bay Area residents who need it most -- people who live in low-income neighborhoods without grocery stores and poor kids who have never been to a farm or cooked fresh vegetables. The backers eventually hope to open a San Francisco center for their community outreach food programs. Both the organizers and the San Francisco County sheriff believe learning to cook a good lunch can help the women once they're free. Not only will they have some tips on how to eat healthier, cooking together in jail also will help them regain a sense of humanity and community.

"It just sort of made sense," said Sheriff Michael Hennessey. "They've got time on their hands in jail, so if we can teach them how to look for healthy ingredients or how to make their food stamp budget go far or make their home cooking interesting enough so kids don't eat fast food or junk food,

then we've accomplished something."

Although he's not completely convinced that poor nutrition and crime can be linked, Hennessey does believe that people who cook food for themselves are less likely to use drugs and commit crimes.

Substance abuse is at the heart of why many people are in jail, he said. A recent survey of the prison population showed 48 percent were incarcerated on drug charges. That doesn't include people who might have been convicted of other crimes in which alcohol or drugs played a role. Add those in, and maybe 75 percent of the people in jail are there, at least in part, because of a substance-abuse problem, the sheriff said.

Changing their path

The women in the cooking class are a slice of about 10 percent of the female inmate population who are focusing on recovery from substance abuse. Most are part of a recovery program called SISTERS (Sister in Sober Treatment Empowered in Recovery), which involves intensive recovery work as well as math and English classes in the charter school run inside the jail.

Teaching prisoners to cook is not a new idea. In the San Francisco Jail, inmates prepare daily meals for the roughly 2,000 prisoners there. And in other parts of the country, cooking classes are used as vocational training. But this is Northern California, so the new jailhouse cooking classes have a decidedly regional twist. Not only do celebrated chefs teach the class and create recipes with a certain California cuisine flair, the emphasis is on the importance of sustainable, locally grown, organic food.

Not that the message was getting across during the first day of cooking school.

Larry Bain, general manager at Acme Chophouse and Jardinière and one of the organizers of the cooking school, offered a sincere lecture on the differences between a supermarket chicken and a free-range bird grown without antibiotics. He touched on globalization, the economics of an industrialized farming system and the horrors of restrictive cage sizes. "So," he finally asked the group, "what's a good chicken?" "A fat one!" said one inmate, to murmurs of approval from the others.

Lost in translation

There were other things that didn't exactly translate smoothly from a high-end San Francisco restaurant to jail. One was the menu, which included chicken prepared with a subtle sauce of thyme, onions and mushrooms, collard greens tarted up with bacon and vinegar, and a Caesar-style salad with homemade croutons.

"I don't want to say it's a black thing or a white thing, but we don't cook this way," said Leticia Hunter, who is in jail for selling crack. "We'd be having Season-All and some chopped garlic and lemon-pepper on this chicken. And we'd be having some rice."

Still, there were some moments when the smells and sound coming from the busy kitchen made it easy to forget where the women were.

"It's like being a traffic cop in Rome," said Acme Chophouse chef Thom Fox, who was halfway through his first stint as lead instructor of the first class.

Fox is a big believer in the power of food to help people change their lives. He thought the first class went well, but like the other organizers, he realizes they've got some work to do to make it culturally appropriate and more practical.

Some of the women were already making it more practical, taking advantage of access to one of the city's name chefs to angle for a job. "You know you get a $10,000 tax write-off it you hire a felon?" McQueen asked Fox.

"We'll talk," he said.

The class is taught in a small demonstration kitchen that was built in 1996 but has barely been used.

Real meals

The jail school is designed to teach women to cook on the limited equipment they might find once they leave jail, and to make sure a meal wouldn't cost much more than a fast-food meal. Although the recipes might have been a little fancier than the bologna sandwiches usually served for lunch in prison, they were written with an eye to economy and nutrition, said Acme sous chef and teacher Erica Holland-Toll. At the end of the class, each woman was given a booklet with the recipes they made that day. Each had a breakdown of the cost to make the dish. A serving of the chicken Parmesan that was the star of lunch, for example, costs $3.70.

Not every student was embracing the idea. The booklet is a nice memento, said Willow Gonzales, a 31-year-old mother who was arrested after police found items in her home from a burglary she says her roommate committed. But without offering a connection to a job or a school program once they get out, the class is just a pleasant way to pass time inside.

"It's nice to know and everything, but they still can't afford to buy the food once they get out of here," she said. "You just stand in the grocery store and get angry because you can't feed your kids."