The Importance of Food Education in Modern Day Schools

as a chef educator i’ve been working

with children

across age groups say from age 3 to age

so why is food education fundamental

to your growth here are the reasons

one food education sensitizes children

with the importance of eating local

seasonal palm fresh biodiverse

ingredients

that are not only good for your gut but

they’re also good for your planet

what does that mean okay just like

plants and animals

human beings are nature too we

correspond

to the change in weather to the change

in climate to calamities to pandemics

and so on

we are dependent on our surroundings on

air water

food etc any imbalance causes disease

while coconut oil may be the thing in

kerala maybe when you’re in punjab

you might want to have mustard oil and

maybe ghee is the right antidote for the

dry average winters or rajasthan

with the change in seasons we experience

a change in cuisine

and with the change in cuisine we

experience a change in our bodies

let me give you an example have you

heard of navratri

nine days of fasting for the mother

goddess the sacred feminine

in those nine days what do we really do

essentially we change the way we eat

why because we need our bodies to

acclimatize

with the change in season but not just

the change in season we also need to

acclimatize

to the change in the crop because the

fields has harvested something and now

it’s going to grow something else

therefore our bodies need need to

acclimatize to that change

which brings me to the point of

biodiversity

now little technical okay but what is

biodiversity

as per the oxford dictionary

biodiversity is the existence of a large

number of different kinds of animals and

plants which make a balanced environment

in simple words biodiversity is the hero

it is the preserver of our soil and the

soil is the

one single resource that we have to grow

our food

a little more about biodiversity imagine

if there’s just

one crop growing in the soil imagine

it’s just strikes okay

and if this rag if rice is growing in

the soil it’s going to deplete the soil

of some nourishment because it needs

that nourishment to grow

now in the second phase if i grow rice

again my soil is already depleted of

that nourishment

therefore the farmer will have to add

something artificial like ddt or urea or

whatever fertilizer

to balance the use of something

artificial

all one needs to do is cross cultivation

which means biodiversity

cross cultivation means you know growing

several more kinds of crops

on that same field which support each

other so they’re friends with each other

and not only do they nourish each other

they also nourish the soil

here we preserve the soil we preserve

the one single resource

that takes millions of years to form

another interesting point from here is

that our

gut our tummies function exactly like

the field

what does that mean just like the field

likes biodiversity

our tummies love biodiversity as well

imagine if i serve you the same food

every single day

isn’t that going to be boring not just

for your taste but also for your tummy

right

so exactly how the field wants cross

cultivation the field needs variety

so does your tummy that makes it a

better digester and a simulator

of food so um for example maybe you

might want to have

um say you know lovely astringent goat

vegetables in the monsoon but you want

to see mangoes in the summer and then

you want

you know warm hearty wholesome mustard

and jaggery during the winter

this in essence represents biodiversity

so to recapitulate this point i’m going

to say

the field is the gut and the gut is the

field

so exactly how the farm functions is

similar to the way

your tummy functions when we have

lessons in farms

generally i would love to have

conversations with children on the labor

and science that goes behind growing

food

also to learn the basic understanding to

have a basic understanding of something

simple as as you sow so shall you reap

it doesn’t hold more true than it does

in a farm

to learn to deal with the unforeseen

calamities droughts floods

all of this can be taught through a

single farm lesson

so that was my first point secondly and

very very important especially today as

in the days

of a huge plural proliferation in the

food media

food education teaches children the

quint essential life skill

of cooking food education teaches

children

the quint essential life skill of

cooking

anybody who needs to eat needs to know

how to cook so i’m guessing

all of you eat and if all of you do you

guys need to know how to cook

cooking is a gender neutral absolutely

important activity that you need to

learn for the rest of your lives

why okay imagine at age three i get kids

in the kitchen and they don’t even know

yet how to cook but they touch

ingredients they feel

ingredients they sniff ingredients they

like some they don’t like some

you know and at age three between ages

three and five they’ve kind of made up

their minds as to what they would like

to try if they have 20 ingredients in

front of them they’re likely to try at

least 10.

that is biodiversity at age 3. as they

grow up we introduce kids to

um to the finer details of cooking we

empower them with

the basic understanding of how to cook

and how to be safe in the kitchen

with this knowledge in hand we empower

chicken with we empower

children with basic motor skills you

know like um

sieving pouring sifting and so on

um when i was eight years old i baked my

first cake

with my mother okay and when we were

baking this cake it’s my favorite cake

by the way it’s called the marble cake

and

i remember the fragrance of my childhood

is the fragrance of my

mother’s marble cake so every time i

would come home she want

she would want to bake a cake with me

and she would say uh guys

why don’t you measure it out okay so at

age eight

i would measure flour butter sugar

milk water and so on i knew my cup

measurements

then she would ask me to measure them in

kilograms and grams

and then ounces and pounds so i knew my

measurements by the time i was age eight

and when i

hit age 12 my physics class was very

very easy

so do you understand that cooking can be

related directly to other subjects

in a school in a school kitchen you know

the opportunity to learn to experiment

and to correlate subjects

for example measurements in physics

coincides with cup measures and gram

measures in the kitchen

is something that empowers children with

practical learning

and also makes learning a lot of fun

with an explosion in the food media

children are fed with wearing images of

food

one doesn’t know how to make sense of

everything say between

food porn to food history to

international cuisine and the very

ethereal michelin star

how do we draw the line between what you

see on tv what you see on

say apps from where you order food and

then what lands up on your plate

that is something that food education

can easily address

moving on to my third point to acquaint

children

food education helps us acquaint

children with the source of all food

what is the source of all food it’s the

farm where do carrots grow

where is milk processed why are mangoes

not available in the summer

let me ask you a simple question where

do you buy

your veggies think about it where do you

buy

veggies chances are maybe you buy them

from the local pushcart

or maybe you order them online room

delivery maybe your staff runs to get it

or maybe the slightly more adventurous

ones go to the sabzi monday

to buy their veggies as a child of eight

years old

my grandfather and i were very close and

he would take me

shopping on sundays and every sunday we

would buy meat and vegetables and fish

and fruits

and i used to think that food comes from

a pushcart

and when i would tell him it comes from

a pushcart

he got really worried and he took me to

the farm and that’s where he showed me

the scale and the magnitude of the farm

he explained to me the importance of

understanding season of understanding

how hard the farmer works

so over over cups and cups of kuler

valley chai

i understood how hard a farmer works how

much of a team

effort it is to grow a simple vegetable

and sometimes very easily we say i don’t

like it very much

um to actually get me more acquainted

with something

as important as farming my grandfather

would bring me back home

and we would sow saplings and seeds

together we would grow our tomatoes and

potatoes

and coriander and mint and garlic and

um cucumber and so on the sheer

joy of actually seeing your first

vegetable grow

feels like you won a trophy it’s an

unparalleled emotion it’s a win

when children actually go to farm during

master class they

are taken around by the farmer

themselves farmers conduct tours and

talks and explain

how they’re farming why they’re farming

a certain way what are the integrated

methods they are using

how the how farming technology is

increasing and so on and so forth we’ve

even gone ahead and addressed careers in

farming

all of this with just several lessons in

the farm which are huge huge fun

okay so uh moving on my fourth point

is food education also helps us

delve into food history now when i say

food history

i don’t only mean the history of the

world i mean

the history of your families i mean the

history of your home

for me my nani’s rajma chawal every

saturday

is a gourmet meal i will not trade that

meal with even the finest michelin star

plate

why because well she would make it

specially for me she would roast the

spices fresh and then she would pound

them on a silvata

with her hands um i would be served that

meal in her garden

and immediately she would pluck a red

radish wash it and pop that on my plate

with a little side of

who’s berry pickle and this for me

is a meal that will probably stay with

me for the rest of my life

it’s a meal that i will pass on to the

next generation but not just the recipe

not just the meal but also a story

imagine if children were to start

documenting their food histories the

histories of their families the recipes

of their families

and create databases for the project

so much of indian food still remains

undocumented imagine if every family

were to do this

how much of a plethora of knowledge we’d

be able to collect familial history

creates community history community

history creates regional history

regional history creates country-wise

history and the country’s history

creates

world history but all of this world

history

starts in your kitchen and that is

something that food education can easily

empower you to do

my last point in support of food

education and hugely important

is slightly macro so so far we’ve been

talking micro we’ve been talking very

personal but now let’s look at it from

the larger world perspective

um as a chef that volunteers for the

united nations manifesto i work very

closely for the sustainable development

goals

especially zero hunger and zero waste

it’s very

staggering and amazing for me to think

that the world largely

eats four basic crops you know rice

wheat

maize and potatoes that’s what the world

is generally surviving on

what does this do this depletes fields

this depletes biodiversity

this depletes indigenous crops this

depletes food history