Over the last 50 years, food teaching has undergone a number of image changes, from the Home Economics of our parents, to Domestic Science, later Food Technology and more recently, Food and Nutrition. Each approach has its merits, but none of them made cooking or how we should eat simpler.
When I look around for examples of healthy people, I think of my mother, who grows most of her own vegetables and fruit. She goes out and looks at what is coming to fruition, then plans a meal. She only picks what she needs, so there is very little waste, and the exercise she gets from gardening keeps her fit. All the food is seasonal, and the environmental cost is zero.
While it is hard to grow enough food at School to supply all our lessons, we can grow enough to demonstrate taste. We can discover the sweetness of a fresh carrot straight from the ground and compare it to one that has sat on a supermarket shelf, we can even experience the agonising, Christmas Eve-like excitement as the first raspberry of the season refuses to ripen.
We encourage eating adventurously by going into the garden with a salt cellar in our pocket and a group of noisy, excited, free-range children (the ones keen to eat anything will encourage the less adventurous ones). We hear cries of:
“Broccoli stalks, where’s mine! I didn’t get one!”.
And in the classroom the children brainstorm what we can do as alternatives to reducing the sugar content of a cake by simply adding chemicals… “Let’s just make one and share!”.
What we would like is a generation of children who grow up eating a balanced, varied, plant-based diet without calling it a plant-based diet, who have a desire to eat the best quality meat and fish just because it has been looked after better, and who eat meat less frequently but with spine-tingling delight and appreciation.
We want them to recognise what is in the garden right now as the best possible thing to eat, not just because they are staunch environmentalists concerned about air miles, but also because it tastes better and hey, why wouldn’t you?
If you don’t believe it is that simple, then look at the Melis family from Sardinia. They entered the Guinness Book of Records in 2012 when the age of the nine siblings totalled 818 years and 205 days. During their long lives not a calorie was counted, nor a biscuit design challenged.
“Everything we ate came from the garden,” said Adolfo. “What you put into your stomach is so important…there is plenty of meat in the local diet, as well as some fish but the trick is to eat little, but genuine food.”
But then what would he know? After all he’s only 98.
So, while food teaching may have had many re-brandings over the years, the essence of food education remains the same: to build an appreciation of good, natural, wholesome food and to understand the basic principles of using them to fuel ourselves. As I take students out to our allotments, survey the worktops during our Leiths classes, or hear their shouts of delight as they discover a new taste or way of cooking, I’m reminded that this, after all, is what many generations of Sidcotians have been doing before us and hopefully, what they will continue to do for generations to come.
Huw Meredith
Teacher of Food and Nutrition