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Where does food come from? “Mommy's iPad."
Published 11 days ago • 4 min read
I learned something in my conversation with Bee Wilson (food writer and journalist for The Guardian), that I can't stop thinking about.
She's developed sensory food education in classrooms across the UK, and she’s finding that many kids have completely lost their connection to real food.
When Bee asks children where food comes from, they used to say "the supermarket."
Now they say "mommy's iPad."
That’s a profound shift: it indicates multiple layers of removal from the origins of what we eat. Food grows on farms or gets made in factories, then travels to grocery stores where it sits under plastic wrap, and now even that step is disappearing as meals just appear on doorsteps via InstaCart.
A child in many countries can grow up having never smelled a tomato still warm from the garden or tasted a strawberry right off the vine.
And now, many of them have never seen someone select a piece of fruit at the grocery store or watched them thump a watermelon to check if it's ripe,
Bee told me about a boy who said he'd never held a real peach before, though he'd had peach-flavored medicine. Another child expected real peaches to look like the peach emoji.
Kids smell fresh mint leaf for the first time with a sense of awe, having only considered it as a flavor for toothpaste or gum.
Depressing, right? But here’s what happens when you put real food in kids' hands.
Bee's organization, TastEd, brings fresh fruits and vegetables into classrooms and invites students to explore them with all five senses.
What do you see? What do you smell? What does it feel like? What do you hear when you snap it or run your fingers along it? What do you taste?
The results have surprised everyone involved, including the teachers and even Bee herself.
Kids who've labeled themselves as "not good at writing" suddenly have language pouring out of them. They describe a tomato as looking like a globe, a planet, a brain, a tree, the letter G, and as soon as one child sees it that way, everyone else can see it too.
There's this shared moment of discovery that happens when kids explore real foods in class, and because they’ve already spoken these rich similes and metaphors out loud, they're practically racing to write them down.
One teacher told Bee it was a real community-building activity for her class, because the food unlocked memories, cultural connections, and personal experiences the kids may have never shared otherwise.
I wanted to share this episode and the free resources at TastEd with you, but NOT because kids' relationship with food is a problem that schools are responsible for solving.
I’m sharing it because I think it’s a really cool experience you might want to have sometime with your students, so you can see what sensory exploration might unlock in their observation skills, vocabulary, oral expression, scientific thinking, and curiosity.
Every TastEd lesson starts with two rules: No one has to try, and no one has to like.
Bee says you can see students relax when you say this, because they know they won't be judged or coerced. Nine times out of ten they try anyway, because curiosity wins out when they see their friends exploring.
If you want to try this, Bee shared a simple cinnamon lesson that works with any age group.
Bring in some ground cinnamon and sliced apples, have kids dip the apple in the cinnamon, then hold their nose and taste it. They'll say it tastes like dust, like nothing at all.
Then have them unpinch their nose.
Their mouths fill with the cinnamon flavor, and they suddenly understand that most of what we call "taste" actually happens in the nose. It's a groundbreaking realization for most kids and honestly for a lot of adults too, and the whole thing takes five minutes.
This got me thinking–what if you showed them cinnamon sticks first? You could show them to kids and have them guess what it is, share where they might have seen the sticks before, and theorize how the stick turns into something that can season our food. You could then show then the jar of cinnamon and continue from there.
Throughout this conversation with Bee, my mind was racing with possibilities (Jackfruit! Kiwi!) and I’m guessing you have some good ideas, too. Try them out and let me know how it goes!
If you want to hear the full conversation, including more of what kids say when they explore food this way and why these lessons are becoming some of the most memorable experiences teachers have in their classrooms, that's in the newest episode of Truth for Teachers.
It's called, "'They know the peach emoji but not real peaches': Re-awakening kids’ curiosity and connection to real food through sensory learning."
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