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
as
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
more and more solutions are required to
develop
um recipes to develop plans of action
to develop calls to action to implement
healthier fields across the world to
address a subject like zero hunger
one will be shocked to think that 690
million
people go to bed hungry every single day
135 million people starve every single
day across 55 countries this is a 2019
statistic
who has the solution for all of this all
of this is yet being researched
in our classes when children have
debates and declarations and discussions
we’re constantly discussing solutions
this brings me to the point that maybe
the policy makers of tomorrow the
professionals of tomorrow are the
students of today
with food education they can help change
the world with food education they can
help impact a deeper change that helps
the population of the rest of the world
in essence and to end my talk
um i’d like to add uh with a request
that food education
needs to be looked on much more
holistically much more
seriously by educators by teachers and
so on
when it comes to food the general
approach is to send the child to
culinary school or to hospitality school
and look at food as a career
that is fine but that is just one small
side of the story
the actual story is that we eat every
day no matter what you grow up to become
doctors lawyers engineers professionals
whatever
you need to eat and you better know how
to eat where your food comes from
and what the right choices are all of
this can be taught through food
all of this can be taught through a
simple kitchen in your school
with our children constantly being
paired with food adverts and with the
food media
we live in the we live in a world where
food is just a click away
let’s slow things down let’s show them
food exactly how it is
farm to fork root to shoot barrel to
glass
thank you very much