Ariana Gunderson
Indiana University
The college and graduate teaching materials for food anthropology are wonderfully robust, with online resources and shelves full of textbooks and readers. But what about food anthropology for younger students?
SAFN members are a generous and well-experienced bunch, and when one member (me!) put out a plea for advice on teaching food anthro to middle schoolers, the listserv hopped with activity as members shared ideas, activities, and stories from their own experiences. To preserve this trove of wisdom, I’ve gathered the responses to share here on our blog.
Do you have ideas and experience teaching k-12 food anthropology? We’d love to hear your additions in the comments!
Contributions have been lightly edited for clarity.
Bring in toy or model foods to “help with 24 hour recalls – kids usually have fun with mock 24 hour recalls or food interviews.”
Mecca Burris
Indiana University
Don’t miss this excellent article on the topic, just published in Food and Foodways:
“Exploring the senses of taste with young children: Multisensory discoveries of food” by Jennifer Coe, Lorenzo Manera and Eric C Fooladi
Abstract: “Offering children multiple occasions and settings to approach new or least-liked foods has value both from a taste development perspective as well as a pedagogical one. New food experiences in positive atmospheres foster pleasure, curiosity and willingness to interact with these ingredients in multiple manners, not only eating or tasting them. This qualitative case study reports 4 and 5-year-old children’s articulation of their experiences in exploratory food ateliers at their preschool. During the study the children’s ideas and perceptions about their sensory experiences with food were documented, while keeping the children at the center of their explorations, in line with the Reggio Emilia approach. Results indicate that the children reflected on changes in their own attitudes and taste toward least-liked foods, as well as including meta-reflections on complex phenomena such as multisensory perception, cross-modal correspondences and taste development. Thus, by promoting multiple multisensory explorations, the study suggests that children can become more open-minded and self-aware, broadening the spectrum of food experiences.”
“Thanksgiving. Ask each child to talk about what they have for their stuffing. Stuffings vary, depending on region. The kid can then ask their parents about what they had in their childhood. Some New Englanders have oyster chestnut stuffing. Middle Atlantic–apples, walnuts, raisins. Southerners often have cornmeal. Some people just use stove top stuffings… Another idea is that they can go on the NASA sites to see what people would eat on the space flight to the planet and then when they get to Mars. Each NASA base has their own resources for kids, starting at age 4, geared to grade standards.”
Richard Zimmer
Sonoma State University
“The resource that comes to my mind is What the World Eats, the photo book by Faith D’Aluisio and Peter Menzel. What I also often use as an intro to food anthropology is the eating motivation survey. I’ll tell my audience there are 17 recorded reasons for why people eat, then put people in groups, and see how many motivations each can generate. Then compare notes, then reveal the list.”
Neri de Kramer
University of Delaware
“About 6 years ago, I conducted interviews with children of different ethnic backgrounds living in Alaska. I asked them about their memories on many different topics, including celebration food. I invited them to remember the smells, colors, flavors… I wanted to trigger their sensory memories. The result was really beautiful! The participants of this project were kids from 7 through 12, so a bit younger than your middle school students. But I still think middle schoolers could engage with something similar, since many, many kids love celebration food!”
Gabriela Olmos Rosas
University of Alaska Fairbanks
“This sounds like fun…I have two children and they love talking about food and identity. This seems easier around holidays and celebratory foods. They are very curious about this. If you wanted to do something experiential, you might bring in different spices or herbs to class and ask them what it makes them think of. My college students like this activity. Another idea is to do something with drawing or storytelling.”
Rachel Black
Connecticut College
“Maybe work in a tiny bit of ethnography-at-home and also some writing. You could ask them to compose a paragraph or two about a time they ate somewhere or something outside their house (down the street or far away; in a friend’s house or at a restaurant), and to think about what was similar to their own family’s food and eating and what was different. What surprised them and why?”
Leslie Carlin
University of Toronto
“I’m teaching a college food anthropology class centered around the (US) National School Lunch Program right now, and our major project is looking at school lunch menus from previous decades. I have a bunch of menus from 1964-2009. It might be fun to look at menus from different decades with the middle schoolers to get them to compare what kids in the past ate compared to today.”
Lisa Beiswenger
Saint Francis University
“Riffing off Lisa’s idea… This would be a great way to engage middle schoolers who are fully immersed in the phenomenon of school lunch! And then to get them to think about how the structure of school lunch (and other food outlets like corner stores, or community gardens) could enculturate different ideas of what makes a meal.”
Jennifer Jo Thompson
University of Georgia
“I don’t know how this would go down with middle schoolers but I got my undergrads into a hot debate over whether American cuisine exists and what is it. You could probably add to it by having them analyze what comes up if you look online for an American food restaurant.”
Jill Richardson
Washington University in St. Louis
“A bit ago I had the opportunity to teach some ancient Roman cooking history / cooking classes. With the middle [and] high schoolers I created a game with different ingredients used in ancient Rome, and then also some that weren’t around then, e.g. red pepper flakes, salt, sugar, honey, cinnamon, saffron, vinegar, cumin… and my own homemade garum! They had to identify the ingredients and decide whether or not they were used in ancient Rome. Then we discussed the answers— if they were used in classical antiquity, I’d give some examples of ancient dishes and modern ones, how the ingredient was used (medicine, religion, etc.) If not, we’d also talk about their history… the Columbian Exchange, “Italian” cuisine stereotypes, etc. Of course, they all enjoyed examining the garum …
With the adults in the cooking class I went through a recipe and the process of translating a recipe, identifying the ingredients (using sources like Pliny or Dioscorides, for example), testing different recipes (because there are very few measurements used in Apicius), and adjusting flavors… both our own preference and the taste of the dish! At the end we cooked the recipe and ate the final product.”
Kathryn Atkinson
Università di Scienze Gastronomiche
“Dina Falconi has really practical information and recipes for safe foraging. It is just unbelievable how much is edible if you train yourself to carefully identify and even label plants in your yard or growing barrels. It’s a very easy school project that can be kept going across seasons by planting both annuals that reseed and perennials that survive the winter. (This can be a good lesson in why different peoples gain identities from weather and affordable food rather than human genetics.)
One plant the kids (and their parents) love is hostas. They are beautiful, cheap, exceptionally sturdy garden plants (you probably know them) that produce flower stems (about 3/8” diameter) that are absolutely delicious when cooked (as you would asparagus). This is a familiar component in Japanese cooking. I still don’t know why we in the US have not taken notice of this delicious easy-to-grow, virtually no work plant that is a perennial. With spring coming (I hope) they might be a good project. Nurseries have them.”
Bethe Hagens
Walden University
I “volunteer[ed] in helping to start an after-school garden (and garden club) with middle school kids at an urban parks and rec site. As the children planned what to plant in our garden, I realized that these kids had very little idea about where the foods they eat come from and what could be grown in our local environment (upstate NY). I did not do this, but it occurs to me you might want to have kids talk about what vegetables or fruits they like to eat and then map where they are actually grown or originated. I’m thinking it might help them to understand both their local community of food growers, and the global interactions involved in what we eat.”
Gail Landsman
University of Albany
FoodAnthropology 
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