Where does our food come from?
Neha Pradhan Arora
Think of your favourite food. Just the thought of it is probably making you hungry and wanting to eat it soon. If I ask you where you think your favourite dish comes from, you may mention the restaurant you frequent, your own or a relative’s kitchen or a similar place. Some of you may mention a region or a country where your dish originated. But is that the only journey the food has made from its country of origin to ours? And what of the dishes that we feel are ‘Indian’ or traditionally from India? Has the dish originated in the region we believe it to or have the idea or its ingredients travelled from other places and over time evolved into something you swear by?
That is the beauty and mystery of food. Every dish is made not just of its ingredients but is a culmination of stories, journeys, flavours, aromas and memories from across time and place. It was to unravel some of these mysteries that I created and experimented with an interactive, exploratory module with middle and high school students, virtually. Given below is an outline of the module:
The objective of the module is to explore these and other questions –
• What is my favourite dish made of?
• Where did these ingredients come from?
• What social, political, ecological and nutritional influences have helped create my favourite dish?
• How do we map these influences historically and geographically?
• Do these dots connect to form one journey?
• How can we share this journey creatively and honestly?
At the end of the exploration, we will have –
• a deeper curiosity of where our food comes from
• an appreciation for the resilience of food
• a sense of gratitude for the food we receive
• a story to share using a tool of your choice
The module was structured into the following elements, each of which could take from 40 to 80 minutes. While it can be done in a physical (face-to-face) class, it is currently designed keeping the virtual teaching-learning space in mind.
I) Connecting over food – Sharing tastes, stories and memories of food.
II) Building curiosity – Learning to trace the journey of my favourite dish.
III) Exploring connections – How does my favourite dish influence the world – economically and ecologically?
IV) Becoming a storyteller – Sharing the story of my food (food festival).
I) Connecting over food – Sharing tastes, stories and memories of food
Before the session, the students must be asked to bring with them a few food items from their kitchen or images/photographs of the same. These could be items that make them smile in anticipation, cringe in disgust or sigh in contentment. Welcome the students with an image of a virtual table and ask them to share what they have brought on this table. As they share the images or food items, you will begin to hear stories, memories and giggles!
After all the sharing, emphasize how food is not just a source of nutrition but represents many other dimensions of our lives. Apart from this personal connection, it also has other connections with our lives. It is these other connections that we will explore for some dishes that mean a lot to us personally.
Pre-task for the next session – What are your favourite dishes – one made in your family and one other dish? Can you bring the dish or some ingredients of the dish that can be eaten at the end of the session?
To conclude, encourage the students to eat one of the items they have brought or something made with that ingredient if available. Encourage conversation around how tastes and preferences differ from person to person. What makes someone cringe may make someone else sigh in contentment. Observe how eating together helps us feel connected, even virtually.
Note for teacher-facilitator
• Depending on the number of students and the time available, encourage sharing for at least one food item.
• Ask students to send you images of the items so you can create a virtual table for the next class.
• It is important for the teacher-facilitator to also participate by sharing and eating with the students.
II) Building curiosity – Learning to trace the journey of my favourite dish
Start the session with a visual of the virtual table to remind students of everything that food makes us feel and the personal connections we all have with food. Ask for favourite dishes verbally or on a digital tool like a word cloud or Padlet. After acknowledging some responses, talk about the journey our food takes to reach us. While most of us are aware of the physical journey that the food takes (from planet to plate), there are some hidden journeys too that the dish and its ingredients have taken to reach us in the form that we like it. In this session, the journeys of the teacher’s favourite dishes will be explored from their past to their present. Where did the ingredients come from? How did the dishes evolve? Sociologically, geographically, historically, politically, culturally?
The teacher-facilitator must then share his/her favourite dish, break it down into its ingredients and trace the origin of each ingredient. Bring in historical, geographical and political elements into the narration so that students are able to discover connections of trade routes, colonialism, historical anecdotes and natural phenomena in the journey of food. The farmer who grew the grain, the explorer who brought the vegetable back from his travels, the king who traded the oil with other countries, the people who used the leaf as a symbol of prosperity, the political leader who used it as a symbol of resistance, a disaster that changed the way the plant grew … so on and so forth.
Encourage sharing of trivia that students may also know about the ingredients or other food journeys. Use of maps to mark these journeys taken by the ingredients to arrive in your kitchen will help students visualize the actual movement of the ingredients. You could also do the same for techniques of cooking to explore how the dish took the form it has today.
Establish that not all the stories are legend but many have their roots in actual facts discerned from historical evidence in the form of archaeological sources (pots, pans, utensils), archaeobotanical sources (plant remains in the utensils – olive seeds, grain), literary sources (ancient texts, reports, documents) and material sources.
Start them off on their own journey by breaking down the process into steps –
• Talk to people who cook the dish or have a lot of food-wisdom.
• Identify the key ingredients in your favourite dish.
• Talk to a naturalist or botanist or geographer (if you know one) about the ingredients and their origin.
• Trace the journey of the ingredient to becoming this dish.
• Look for credible, authentic sources of information in books or online portals.
Encourage them to map this journey on a world map creatively with doodles, words, images, arrows and lines. Explain that they will also share this journey using any tool(s) they would like – writing, drawing, digital media, story-telling, visual collage or others – at the end of this module.
End the session with everyone eating their favourite dish even as they share stories, ask questions or just enjoy the food.
Pre-task for the next session
• Trace the journey of your favourite dish or dishes creatively for us.
• Are there other dishes that can be made with the same ingredients? Can you experiment one such dish and bring it the next time?
Note to teacher-facilitator
I chose rice and masoor dal as one favourite and vegetarian pasta as the other to be able to showcase a variety of ingredients which are considered local and those which are considered global. Here is how I broke it down in my research and narrated as a story using visuals and maps.
| Ingredient | When and where did it originate? | How did it become this dish? | Other significance |
| Wheat – pasta | Been around for more than 10,000 years. Traces found in the Fertile Crescent in Mohen-jo-daro. | Pasta is inspired by the noodles Marco Polo had on his travels to China. Pasta in this form originated in Italy, spread to Europe and then to America as macaroni. | |
| Rice | One of the oldest cereals grown in India and China – indica and japonia varieties. It was brought to Europe by Alexander. Some varieties also found in West Africa. | More than a lakh varieties in India traditionally – now around 6000. | Significance in cultural rituals. |
| Olives | Oldest known trees – also found in Egyptian tombs, and the Fertile Crescent. | Oil extracted and traded in by Romans. Oil – Liquid gold with various cultural and mythological significance. | Olive leaves wreath – Olympics. Plant a tree on the birth of a child. |
| Onions | Found in Egyptian pyramids and in Roman times. From Western India, Pakistan, Afghanistan to China and Central Asia. | Eaten wild and raw earlier. Easy crop to grow, didn’t perish easily, sustains life. Medicinal properties. Valuable. | Kheda Satyagraha – Mohanlal Pandya – Gandhi later wrote, “We may never bow down to blind authority but if necessary, we shall remove onions and go to jail a thousand times.” Mentioned by Chinese travellers who came to India. |
Since there are various sources – research sites, university websites, blogs, cookbooks and others, many of which are also subjective, here are some norms I followed that helped me in my research (which I also shared with the students) –
• Look for established institutions.
• Look for sites with expertise.
• Check the date.
• Avoid anonymous authors.
• Verify across websites and cite sources.
III) Exploring connections – How does my favourite dish influence the world – economically and ecologically?
Start the session with some cue questions to get quick highlights of what the students have started exploring about the journey of their favourite dishes –
• Did you learn something new?
• Did you learn something that changed an earlier belief?
• Did you learn something unusual or surprising?
• Did you learn something that you can’t believe?
Bring back the students’ attention to the other journey of our food – from planet to plate and establish that this session will explore the ecological and economic journey of our food and the impact that has on the planet and its people.
Use questions like ‘What does the ingredient need to grow? “What happens to the ecosystem if we grow too much or too little of one thing?” to explore the deep connection between consumerism and sustainability. Use a case study of a fruit/vegetable/crop that has been made popular and is now grown in huge quantities in the region where it originated. How would this impact the region?
A parallel case study of the Green Revolution can also be shared with the students to raise and explore questions related to agriculture being profitable or sustainable. Share data on the short-term and long-term impact of this in India. Videos by Vandana Shiva and other environmentalists could also be shown here to reinforce the connection between our consumption (what we grow and eat) and the state of the planet.
What can we do about this? Ask the students to wonder what they would do if they were a food scientist, an environmentalist, a farmer, an agricultural scientist or a political leader. After a brief discussion, ask them if there is anything they can do now, as consumers, to reduce the ecological and economic cost of our food. Facilitate the discussion along the following points –
• Find out where the food comes from.
• Reduce the distance between the farm and the table – buy and eat what grows locally, see if you can grow something in your balcony or garden.
• Have local variety in your diet – nutritional and ecological.
• Build seasonal fruits and vegetables into your diet.
• Support farmer initiatives, cooperatives and local markets rather than big corporates and supermarkets.
• Reduce food wastage.
• Compost.
• Protect the biodiversity – bees, butterflies, birds, insects are all part of the ecosystem that grows our food.
• Question everything or most things that come out of a packet/packaged bottle and has chemicals in it.
• Make sustainable food choices.
Pre-task for the next session
• Think of the ecological journey of your food and add that to your food story!
• See if you can change an ingredient in your favourite dish to make it nutritionally and ecologically sustainable.
• Think of a sustainable food choice you can and want to make.
Also tell them that the next class will be the food festival where each one will celebrate their favourite dish by sharing its story (in a pre-determined structure and timing).
End the class with everyone eating the dish they have brought. This time encourage the students to think of the journey of the dish – ecologically, historically, culturally – the changes it had gone through even as it changed, evolved and sustained itself through the centuries. Remind them of every bite being a glimpse into the journey. Encourage them to eat silently, cherishing and savouring the dish and feeling gratitude for being able to receive and eat the dish.
Note to the teacher-facilitator
• I created a case study on ‘avocado’ since that was a fruit my participants were familiar with and the statistics around avocado production are shocking. (Each year, 11 billion pounds of avocado are consumed around the world. Around 9.5 billion litres of water are used daily to produce avocado – equivalent to 3,800 Olympic pools – requiring a massive extraction of water from local aquifers in Mexico). (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/avocado-environment-cost-food-mexico/)
• Use local examples for the discussion on what can you do as consumers.
• Share your own sustainable food choices (if you don’t have any – try making one before you start this module).
• Play some peaceful music while everyone is eating.
• Ensure enough gap before the food festival to ensure that students have enough time to do their research and document the journey of the food.
• Ensure that the task for the food festival is clear to all students and give written instructions and timings if needed. A pre-decided sequence would also be good to ensure effective use of time, in case of a large group.
• It would also add to the joy if each student invites one person to the food festival.
IV) Becoming a storyteller – Sharing the story of my food
This session is a celebration of food and a sharing of the stories of the food as discovered by the students. After welcoming any guests that may be there, the session starts with students one by one presenting their food journeys.
At the end of the session, ask students to reflect on the process of the exploration and share what they felt the exploration had helped them learn about food. Encourage guests also to share. End the class with a sharing on what it means to eat mindfully even as we all feel connected to each other and to the planet, to the past and the present, to where we are and where the food has come from.
Note to the teacher-facilitator
• Videos or resources on mindful eating can be used in this session to reinforce the concept and practice of mindful eating.
• A reflection form could be given to the students as a review of the module.
• A digital visitor book could be created on Padlet.
• A descriptive rubrics with the following parameters could be used to assess what each student shares –
1. Able to trace the journey of his/her favourite dish across time (historically) and space (geographically).
2. Able to explore deeper connections between environment, economics and individual choices.
3. Able to share impactfully the story of his/her favourite dish.
• Remember the objective of the module is not to find or have all the answers but to embark on a journey.
Additional note
Requirements for this module, to be done virtually –
• Curiosity.
• Access to online teaching-learning.
While the module can be simplified for grade 5 and below, it is ideal for grade 8 or above to be able to explore and appreciate completely the different layers in the conversation and the multiple connections in the stories.
The author is a creative and passionate educator who has worked in the education and development sector for over 15 years with a focus on building capacities of young people and teachers. She works with schools across the country to help strengthen the teaching-learning environment through dialogue and learning experiences. She can be reached at
