3.1+Learning+to+love+food

Touch it, smell it, taste it, eat it. "Eating" is the final step in a very complex process. We have __**not**__ failed if a student does not eat all the food in front of them.
 * Learning to love food before we eat.

"Eating is a learned behaviour". Our job as educators is to help our students learn to love the food before we expect them to eat it. Many of our students struggle with sensory integration. Eating is an exercise in sensory integration. Heston Blumenthal believes our perception of food lies in the multi-sensory perception of flavour. He has explored the science of food and the effects of smell and taste on the palate, the senses, the memory and the emotions. We can use some of Hestons work as inspiration as we attempt to re-educate our students to love fresh whole food. ''Eating involves all the senses simultaneously. The nose and mouth detect separate and distinct qualities in food. The mouth tastes, the nose smells. Taste and aroma together equal flavour.'' The more you can create food that makes a concerted appeal to all the senses - sound, sight, touch, taste and smell, he says, the more intense, immediate and satisfying the eating experience will be.

As many of our students become defensive when confronted with familiar and perhaps unfamiliar foods we need to be creative when presenting foods to our students. One unthreatening way is to use food as the resource for as many lessons as possible. If we can make a difference to the diet of our students their learning potential will be increased and behaviour may be altered as the body increasingly gains the nutrients it needs to thrive. The garden offers an abundance of resources for learning about colour, numeracy, language, texture, creative arts and the list goes on.

If students are using fruits and vegetables for counting lessons and the like, they will inadvertently be engaged in a sensory awareness of the food as well. Don't worry about wasting the food because it is not eaten. If the student has seen it, touched it, smelt it or heard it, the crop has not been wasted.

Food connects people. All our senses become interconnected and alive when around food.
> **Sniffing Makes Food Fun.** It makes us pay attention to the senses. Mums may have told us not to play with our food, but playing with food is a wonderful way for children to overcome their fear of it. > Many people wolf down their meals without even really paying attention to them. Your goal is to create a child who loves healthy, fresh, wonderful-tasting food, and dislike the bland, artificial flavours of processed food. Teaching them to pay attention to the senses of smell and taste will help them reach this goal.
 * **We see it**. We go to a market and see all the colourful fruits and vegetables, we can pick the good or the bad by looking at them. We walk past a patisserie, see pastries and sweets at the window, they make us hungry. We share a meal with friends and can see them enjoying it. Nothing translates how good a meal is better than the look on a person’s face.
 * **We hear it.** We heat up oil in the pan and hear the crackling sound it starts to make and know it’s ready for more ingredients. We hear the knife hitting the cutting board as we’re chopping vegetables, or cutlery as it comes into contact with a plate. We can hear the different sounds resulting from cutting through different vegetables. And best of all, we can judge how good pastry is by the sound it makes when cutting through it.
 * **We smell it**. As the onion starts cooking through in the oil in that pan, the aroma in the house always reminds me of my mom’s cooking. We smell some fruit before we buy it to judge its quality. We smell food to check if it’s gone bad. We smell coffee beans as they’re being ground. But more than anything I love it when the smell of whatever is baking in the oven invades the house and makes me hungrier than I already am.Smell is the “first sight” of food, the first thing you notice before even seeing a dish. The smell of food is part of its flavour. One way to teach children to like the taste of healthy food, is to give them lots of "lessons" in the taste of healthy food. We need to have them smell food. Smelling food is safe -- they don’t actually have to TRY it! It also gets them accustomed to the taste of healthy foods. If a child sniffs guavas a few times, they may find them less strange when they actually taste them. Children often need a dozen or more "lessons" in a food before they come to like it. Smelling is an easy and painless lesson.
 * **We touch it**. We see fruits and vegetables but we still have to touch them to check how ripe they are. A cake or a pie just came out of the oven and is looking ready to be eaten, but we have to touch it to judge if it’s cooked. We go to a bakery to buy bread and we give it a little squeeze to judge how fresh it is. If we use food as the resource in maths or literacy or even creative arts students will be touching the foods without the fear of eating it. They will learn about its texture, colour and feel. When we do ask them to eat it they may not be so scared to have a go.
 * **We taste it**. We eat it and we savour every bite as our taste buds go on a different journey with every meal. It goes from savoury to sweet, dry to moist, mild to chilli. We can taste the different textures. And I always find amazing the food cravings of my taste buds. It’s a roller coaster of food that makes no sense, and is not intended to make sense. Chicken now, chocolate an hour later, cheese afterwards.

Understanding nutrition, autism and eating can help us plan lessons to engage our students.

__** So how do we teach students to love food? **__ If so much of our eating habits are determined by our sensory experience of food we need to find creative ways to help our students create a positive relationship with healthy food. One way to do this is to use food as a resource. We have a garden overflowing with free resources to use for visual and creative arts, numeracy, literacy, science and history lessons. By using the resources we have around us we are also meeting sustainability goals.

__ Below are just a few ideas to get you started. __ Don't forget there are many resources on the In the Garden page and In the Kitchen page.
 * [[file:Exploring the harvest unit junior and primary unit..pptx]] this is a basic unit for juniors or primary.

> >  THE HUNGRY CATERPILLAR - Butterfly Bites - celery cut in half and filled with cream cheese with two pretzels added for wings > IF YOU GIVE A MOUSE A COOKIE - Mouse Cookies - round sugar cookies with 2 quarter circles as ears, decorated with chocolate chips and M&Ms > THE THREE LITTLE PIGS - Pigs in a Blanket - hotdog wrapped in a crescent roll > PUMPKIN, PUMPKIN - Toasted Pumpkin Seeds > CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS - Miniature Meatballs > STREGA NONA - Spaghetti Salad - cold pasta salad with chopped veggies and italian dressing > CAPS FOR SALE - Frosty Frozen Bananas - frozen bananas on a stick, dipped in melted chocolate rolled in nuts or sprinkles > JOHNNY APPLESEED - Baked Caramel Apples > GREGORY the TERRIBLE EATER - Dippety Do - delicious dip and crisp fresh veggies > OWL MOON - Man in the Moon Salad - lemon gelatin placed in margarine tubs, cut pineapple slices to make face > Enormous turnip, We used the turnip crop to explore literacy maths and drama as well as creative arts  Charlie and Lola " I will not ever, never eat a tomato" I'm sure a Google search will find many more. . media type="custom" key="23497494"
 * ** Literature Links **Another way to integrate food, nutrition, and cooking into the curriculum is to use cooking activities as one extension of a story-based unit.


 * === So many of our students enjoy playdough and painting why not use foods to create natural dies and scents to add to the playdough and paint. All the time highlighting the sensory experience of sight, smell, sound and feel as a vehicle to developing positive taste experiences. ===

Exploring Colour the natural way Instead of adding color using artificial food dyes that are [|harmful to our health], we can take a little extra time to create colour using natural sources ~ other foods. Because the color in these **natural dyes** is so concentrated, it only takes a small quantity of added color to make your creation. Yellow - turmeric (Raylee used nasturtium flowers) Baby pink - rasberries ( mash and strain juice from a dozen fresh or thawed frozen raspberries) Pink - currants ( blend handful of currants in a blender and add directly) or raspberry tea bag Blue/purple - blueberries (mash and strain juice from a dozen fresh or thawed frozen blueberries) Dark pink - blackberries (mash and strain juice from a dozen fresh or thawed frozen blackberries) Green - mint or spinach cooked and strained

Try using flour and water with colour of choice and cooking the artwork in the microwave to dry it quickly. Then it can be put straight into the workbooks. Supplies: Fill your bowls with milk and food coloring. Then let the kids paint their toast. Toast in oven or sandwich press. Then let the kids eat their Painted Toast.
 * __Painting Toast__**
 * Bread
 * Bowls and Brushes – you need a bowl and brush for each color.
 * Natural Food Coloring
 * Milk – whatever kind you have. You don’t need a lot of milk,
 * Toaster Oven

__ This is the recipe __ * 2 cups of corn flour * 1 cup of cold water* 4.5 cups of boiling water* natural food colouring __Method:__Mix the cornflour with the cold water and stir together. Pour in the boiling water and stir between each cup. It goes really strange but keep stirring and it literally seems to "melt" into a wonderful, custard-like consistency. We then separated it into individual jam jars before adding colouring, but you can do it however you like and this is the stage to add colour. The paint is thick and gel-like and so takes a long time to dry, but when it does it makes a great, almost 3-D effect on the paper. Store paint in the fridge
 * __Homemade Edible Finger Paint__**

__ Homemade Natural Colouring water paint __
It's possible to make a whole rainbow of colours using a little imagination.


 * __ Salad Spinner Art with natural paints __**
 * 1) Take some paint (try natural made paint) and use a salad spinner.
 * 2) Cut out some circles from any colour card, just smaller than the bottom of the basket inside the spinner.
 * 3) Put a circle of card in the basket and keep in place using a little bit of BluTac.
 * 4) Squeeze paint directly onto the card- as many different colours as you like.
 * 5) Turn the handle and spin the basket really fast! This is pretty difficult but also a fantastic gross motor skill to develop.
 * 6) Repeat with different colour combinations and experiment with the effects that can be created.

Students can brainstorm fruits, veggies and other colorful foods and then experiment with creating a beautiful and natural rainbow. Not only is it educational but it can also help your kids learn to appreciate the natural beauty of foods. And the process can be translated into many other cooking projects or non-edible projects such as homemade finger paints and homemade playdough.
 * __Try a rainbow cake made with natural dyes__**

Hints for Using Homemade Dyes in Recipes

 * When trying something new, don't use too much water when cooking the fruits and vegetables to extract color. Use just enough water to cover the food in the pot.
 * Try boiling for a longer period of time to boil off more water, leaving a more concentrated solution to add to your frosting or cake batter.
 * Juicing the fruits and vegetables will generate a more concentrated color compared to boiling a food to extract color.
 * Save cooking liquid from foods (like beets) when cooking a meal. Store for when you're ready to bake.
 * Use a cheesecloth to strain liquids.
 * Have some pre-made natural food dye on hand for emergency baking projects

a simple no cook playdough recipe made in minutes Note: Increase the above amounts two or three times for more playdough which can be divided and coloured differently. __Herbal Playdough__- fresh herbs eg rosemary, thyme, sage, oregano, mint (anything that smells nice and is not irritant!)
 * __Re-thinking playdough.__**
 * Ingredients:**
 * 1 cup flour
 * ½ cup salt
 * 1 teaspoon cream of tartar (or lemon juice)
 * 1 tablespoon oil
 * 1 cup boiling water
 * natural or food colouring (eg. beetroot, turmeric powder, coco), optional
 * 1) In a bowl mix all dry ingredients.
 * 2) Add oil, liquid colouring and boiling water and stir until it all comes together.
 * 3) Tip the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead it until it becomes smooth. If the playdough is still too hot to touch, leave to cool a bit.
 * 4) Divide into several portions and add different colouring few drops at the time to each. Knead well into the playdough.
 * 5) Store in an airtight container after play time.

[[image:halindagreen/20130307_121009.jpg width="254" height="160"]]
=== You can add some small twigs for pushing into the dough. It would also be good to introduce pebbles, grass, leaves, pine cone kernels and flower petals for adding a range of textures for exploration. ===

__ Imprint Play Dough __
Make a batch of natural colour dough (use coffee or coco to colour) and make imprints with items from the garden. ===__ Playdough Pizzas __ - Pick some fresh rosemary and bay leaves from the garden and find green lentils, penne pasta and spaghetti in the cupboard. Sit outside under the shade of a tree, squishing and squeezing, rolling and flattening, poking and mixing until you have a few plates of little pizzas for pretend cooking and eating. Yum! === If possible try to make a real pizza too to extend lesson to taste and smell once cooked. __Build an Outdoor Concoctions Kitchen in the garden__ Setting up a simple, open-ended messy play area in the garden. It is a place where the students can explore, create, investigate, imagine, mix and concoct using the materials around them and generally have some good, old-fashioned, messy FUN! You can collect some flower pots, old pots and pans, paintbrushes, spoons, potato masher, bread board, muffin tin, milk jugs and trowels and added them to the area, ready for lots of investigating to begin! Gather up some grass cuttings, and other foliage from around the garden, and add them as ingredients in the various pots. Pick some fresh rosemary, parsley and mint from our herb garden and added those to some little pots for some extra sensory play. Students practise lots of spooning, transferring, mixing and tipping. They make and serve up a delicious dinner Mud, grass, herb, water, soap, sand soup anyone?Other ideas for ingredients for them to experiment with are: cornflour, sugar, vinegar, food colouring, salt, bicarbonate of soda, flour, rice, pasta, lentils, porridge oats and beans. **__Possible questions to ask as they play:__** **__Learning Links:__**
 * what does that smell/ look/ feel like? what do you think it is?
 * what is the soil like before we add water? describe it
 * what do you think will happen when we add water? try it!
 * what does it feel and look like now? can you splash in it like a puddle?
 * what can you make with wet mud? can you make anything stick together with dry mud?
 * what can you make with X ingredients?
 * **sensory:** exploring materials with hands and feet/ smell/ texture
 * **literacy:** developing vocabulary to describe new experiences and feelings/ incorporating stories and poems into whole body play/ imagining and creating storylines in role-play
 * **maths:** counting out objects and spoonfuls/ experimenting with capacity by filling and emptying/ arranging and sorting objects by size, colour, shape, material
 * **creativity:** using imagination to create stories and role-play
 * **social skill:** playing independently/ working co-operatively/ maintaining concentration and sustained involvement in play/ decision making
 * **science**: investigative thinking skills/ what if? questioning/ exploring materials/ observing change of materials from dry to wet.



Labelling Fruits and vegetables [] -online quiz for foods and kitchen utensils []