Food, Kids and Cooking

Food is a basic necessity. For many eons, humans have been fairly successful at finding, hunting and growing food. This is evident in the fact that there are nearly 7 billion of us on the planet. Yet for many people today, food remains somewhat of a mystery.

I will admit that I am one of these people. The other day, as I was making lentil salad, I realized I have no idea what the plant form of lentils looks like, despite the fact that I eat a fair quantity on a regular basis. Like many of us, I suffer from a disconnect between the origin of my food and its appearance on the grocery store shelves.

I started thinking seriously about food a number of years ago, when I was in teacher's college. I had a sudden inspiration in the grocery store about an integrated unit related to the grocery store. Integrated units were the rage at the time (if you're in education, you will see that I am clearly dating myself here!). The idea was to combine subjects in order to show their relevance to the real world. For example, my grocery unit combined math (costs/budgeting, measurement and proportions), geography (mapping food origins, comparing growing regions/climates), history (comparing older and newer recipes), language arts (writing the recipe, following directions, reading labels, etc.) and so on.

The general idea of my grocery unit is as follows: on the first trip to the store, take a general survey of the different places foods we regularly eat come from. Return to the classroom and plot the items on a map.
Next, the class votes on 2-3 popular food recipes to make together in groups. Once the recipe is recorded, there is a second trip to the grocery store to purchase items. Older kids are encouraged to budget at this stage and to read (or calculate) the value of the ingredients on a cost per unit basis.
Back in the classroom, the kids prepare their foods and share them. They also plot out (on a new map) the origin of each of the ingredients. Older kids are asked to calculate the total (minimum) distance their ingredients had to travel in order to reach them. The recipes are shared with the entire class.

An extension to this that I've tried to do with my own family as a homeschooling parent is to grow some of the ingredients, and visit farms (we joined a CSA) and farmer's markets to see the entire process of food production. We have been fascinated by brussel sprout trees, enchanted with the baby cows, and learned that there's a lot more to soil than meets the eye. We also learned that there are different farming philosophies, and that we have some strong feelings about where our food comes from--something which  just a few years earlier I'd never really thought much about.

The kids have also learned to cook, which is a skill that I believe will help them maintain healthy eating habits throughout their lives. Some of their favourite recipes can be found here.

So now my new mission will be to figure out just what lentils look like from start to finish.