Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today, in honour of the beginning of the school year this month, I want to do a quick episode about why cooking and food teaching is not just teaching a basic life skill, although that is very important, but how it is a vehicle for teaching lots of other parts of the curriculum and lots of skills that you wouldn't necessarily think of as being related to food. So whether you have a child in preschool, in a school, if you're home schooling, or if you just want to help your child to learn some things at home, hopefully this will interest you. Back in July we had an episode with a food teacher called Chris Lord who's been teaching food and cookery for over 20 years in several different countries and we talked about how secondary school formal food educations have changed during that time, as in what children get in their GCSEs or A levels when they opt to take a food exam.
But today I'd like to circle back and talk about the food teaching that all children receive in school, not just the ones who choose it as an option. There are frameworks for universal food education from early years through to primary and into secondary and they vary somewhat depending on which part of the UK you're in. But outside of the formal parts of the curriculum, lots of schools also do other less formal activities with food or use it to deliver other skills or knowledge because they know that children enjoy it or because an individual teacher or teaching assistant has a passion for it.
In some schools they take this one step further and have a whole school food approach including their school kitchen, growing food in their grounds and involving parents and kids in food provision. And we will have an episode later in the year talking about this more, but for today I'm going to answer the concern that some parents and indeed some teachers and school leaders have, which is why would you do more food teaching than is necessary when there's so many demands on time to deliver the mandatory curriculum. I have another short interview with Chris today where he talks about how he has used food to deliver other parts of the curriculum in his schools, and then I will run through some examples of other ways to use food in learning. So first, here's the interview with Chris.
Joanne (02:15)
So, hey Chris, you've been teaching school food now, cookery in school for like 18 years. So why do you think that school food education is important?
Chris (02:26)
I think that food education is important for not only teaching students about nutrition, the life skills about cooking, but I think it's the most cross curricular subject that you can do. It fits into any other subjects, you can teach geography through food, you can teach history through food, you can teach obviously food science, food chemistry. So just seeing the holistic nature of how food can help the students understand topics in different contexts is really important. But just the very basics of someone who knows how to cook will cook for themselves when they're older and pass that on to their children, hopefully cook for their children.
Joanne (03:06)
Could you give a couple of examples of say the geography or the science or whatever how you managed to use that through your cooking?
Chris (03:13)
Yeah, I I wrote a whole syllabus for the International Baccalaureate on Food Science. it's understanding the physics of heat transfer. It's understanding the chemical reactions that happen when you mix, agitate ingredients together, when you're heating ingredients, the nutritional biology of the interrelationship between the different foods, the different nutrients, how you need them in different amounts in your body.
And then the history, well, all civilizations, where they decided to situate themselves was down to food sources. either where land you could grow food on or it was near water sources where you could catch fish or where could rear animals.
I mean, there's so many examples of different subjects and how you can bring food into it. I've just been asked to teach a interdisciplinary unit with a Spanish class. They're going to plan a recipe in Spanish and then the Spanish teacher is going to bring them in and teach them with my help how to cook the different things that they want to cook.
Joanne (04:16)
Food is so much a part of human existence. Of course, it's going bleed into every part of life, isn't it?
Chris (04:22)
Yeah, and I also co-teach with the business studies teachers because the food industry is the biggest industry in the world. often learn about costing, marketing, branding degree was food marketing management, so that fits really well into my skill set.
Joanne (04:37)
Brilliant. For head teachers or educators that are listening or parents who want to know why their school is really interested in cooking and why they do so much food stuff at their child's school, those are the reasons why is that they can teach more or less everything using food.
Chris (04:51)
Yeah, don't think there's a subject even like art. I always say it's culinary art. On Instagram, I love looking at the food art pictures that people do. Yeah. Just how we can use food as just another material.
Joanne (05:06)
Of course, of course.
Chris (05:13)
We've even got the music teacher creating children's songs about healthy eating now using The Wiggles as their inspiration.
Joanne (05:15)
Mashed potato, mashed, is it mashed potato?
Chris (05:19)
Fruit salad, yummy yummy.
Joanne (05:20)
Fruit salad, yummy,
Joanne Roach (05:26)
Okay so be honest, are you now singing the fruit salad song or the mashed potato song in your head? We loved The Wiggles in this house.
Anyway, so as Chris said, you can teach more or less anything using food because it's so interwoven with everything we do in the world. There are quite a lot of early years and school support organisations that provide curriculum link ideas now, as well as lots of resources for home educators too, and I will link to some of them in the show notes.
But as an example, I'm going to refer to an overview from an organisation called Food for Life, which is one of those schemes that schools can opt into to build some of that whole school framework that I mentioned. I worked in a school which is one of their first ambassador schools more than 15 years ago and their approach is absolutely brilliant. I will link to them in the show notes so you can check out if they could be great for your school. On their website they have a chart of how each curriculum area can be taught using food and I'm just going to run through some of that now to give you some inspiration.
So the first thing we tend to think of in school curriculum is literacy and numeracy. So here's some for those. So in terms of literacy, just basic things like listening to instructions and following instructions with cookery, describing tastes and textures of foods, There's things like instructional writing, writing recipes and menus. Recipes is a really good way to learn instructional writing, and also creative writing about food.
In numeracy you can probably think of some of the ones here so things like weighing and measuring things, estimating how much you need of something, arrays, fractions, percentages and decimals, measuring time for preparation and for cooking ratios and proportions of things so for example if you make pancakes and pancakes uses one egg to a certain amount of flour, certain amount of sugar, a certain amount of liquid and then you make two or three times that amount how do you work out the ratios and the proportions and then also things like money management and budgeting when you start to talk about food in the home.
Then you've also got science as one of the core subjects. So you can probably think of some of the ideas here. So nutrition, food and as Chris suggested there's things to do with chemical reactions in cooking, the function of different ingredients in a recipe, food hygiene, there's lots of stuff to do with heat and cold and bacteria and health in there. The environmental impact of food production, talking about things like GM foods, where food is grown, deforestation, food miles, using heat, seasonal foods, all those kinds of things going to back to science.
In history, there's historical recipes, historical cooking methods and equipment, social influences on cooking styles and recipes. So back to what Chris was talking about, about how people lived in particular areas of the world because of the food that was available there. And also the ways that what people eat has changed when different foods become available from different parts of the world. What our life would be like without potatoes and tomatoes from the Americas for example.
In geography we can go back to what people eat in different parts of the world and why, why there are things available in those areas of the world, why it's to do with the environment that's there, where our food comes from and how it travels here, things about seasonality, farming methods in different areas, getting locally sourced produce, all the human geography elements of how food gets from a farm to a manufacturer or processor to a warehouse to a shop to a person to a home.
in religion and moral education part of the curriculum there's all the stuff to do with religious food regulations and rules and also about food and religious celebrations. Quite a lot of the time when we talk about religions that aren't the one that we've grown up with we talk about things and celebrations and the way that people dress the way that people cook the way that people share things at celebrations and so food's a really good one for that.
And finally for physical education there's all the elements around nutrition and how that can work with exercise, the function of different nutrients in the body, energy balance and so on.
So as you can see, it can really fit into any part of the curriculum. You might not really think about ice cream as being a particularly scientific topic, but you can learn about solids, gases, freezing and heating in that. You might not particularly think about cookies as being a very maths based subject, but you can not only learn about ratios but also things like fractions for example if a dough is supposed to make 24 cookies in order to cook in the right time, then how you go about dividing those up? That's using fractions. So there's loads of really practical ways that we actually bring curriculum elements into anything to do with learning about food, both at home and in school.
Joanne Roach (10:04)
So hopefully that's highlighted just some of the ways that cooking and nutrition work can enhance children's education in general. Not to mention that if you also bring in food growing, as the Food for Life scheme and some of the frameworks do, there are other valuable life skills there too and connection to the outdoors. If you found this interesting I would urge you to go to the show notes and look at some of the links and see whether you think it might be of interest to your school or setting if you're an educator or your child's school if you're a parent to see if it's something that you might be able to volunteer to help with.
I think it's easy to think of food teaching as just being about learning to make an apple crumble, but it is so much more than that. Although honestly to be fair both my kids did actually make up a crumble and it was absolutely lush. I hope you'll check out the links and have a think about how you can use food at home too to help you talk about or learn some of the things your child is interested in or needs to learn.
On Thursday I'll be back with the regular monthly roundup of five easy family meals where you can use some seasonal foods so I hope to see you then and in the meantime happy eating!
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