It all started with the ‘new rice’ being served in the dining hall of our residential school. This novel alternative to regular rice was actually foxtail millet (korrain Telugu), and a group of 13-14 year olds at our lunch table were totally intrigued by it. Questions and comments came flying thick and fast, as I, ever the teacher, alternately tried to field their questions or just listened with fascination. “What is this new rice?”, “Why are we being served this?”, “I quite like it, it’s nutty and very different from regular rice”, “Why is the rice in school not white?” (we normally serve unpolished, hand pound rice) “Is this korra good for health?”, “Is it a kind of rice or something else?”, etc. “Well yes, it is a rice but comes from a completely different grain, similar to the ragi that we drink every morning - it is a millet”, I added. As the conversation progressed we delved deeper into the story of korra:where we get it from, how it is grown, and then realising that it is grown right here on the campus. This meant we could go see the korra fields and the plant. From this emerged an idea for a class project where we would collectively explore the question: Where does our food come from?
One question, many directions
This seemingly simple question resulted in a thought-provoking educational experience about how we think about food, what we know about how it is grown, how it appears on our plates and how our choices around food can have a profound impact on nature, on people's lives and even on our planet. This one question threw up more questions than answers. I will share this experience in a two-part article. Part 1 (The journey of food) is about the questions that emerged as we tried to understand the journey of our food. Part 2 (Understanding ourselves and each other through food) will show how this process of exploration helped students develop a better understanding of themselves and their fellow students.
A joint exploration
While the exploration of the question started as a project for Class 8 students of the residential school (RS), we thought it might be interesting to do this together with Class 8 students from the nearby Zilla Parishad (local government) High School (ZPHS) and collectively share and reflect on our experiences. The ZPHS headmaster and teachers were game and the students from both schools were very excited.
RS is a private institution where most of the children and adults come from urban areas from across India. The school is located in a rural, pastoral-farming community in Chittoor District of the semi-arid Rayalseema region of Andhra Pradesh. Students in RS typically come from affluent families and have been exposed to international cultures and cuisines. The ZPHS students come from the surrounding rural community of small farmers and landless labourers. Their exposure to food other than local cuisine comes typically from television and movies and through packaged snacks available in the nearby shops.
What do we eat, What goes into it, Where does it come from?
We began with each student (and one of the teachers) maintaining a 'food diary' of everything that they ate or drank over one week. At the end of the week the diaries were reviewed by the teachers and we tried to understand what goes into each of the foods, by writing down the recipes. The RS students consulted the cooks and dining hall manager since they eat all their meals at the dining halls. The ZPHS students consulted their parents and other elders since they live at home and study in a day school. Drawing from the recipes, the various ingredients were listed and categorised into grains, pulses, oils and fats, dairy products, meat, fish, vegetables, fruits, condiments and others.
The nuances of food
Tabulation was just the start of the inquiry. At every stage, more questions arose. “Are dals pulses or grains?”, “Are they different from legumes?”, “If they are legumes then they must be nitrogen fixing right?” Through these questions we began to understand the differences between grains, pulses and beans and a little bit about their connections to the nitrogen cycle and why they are considered rich sources of protein. RS is a vegetarian campus where eggs are served for breakfast and sometimes at dinner. This led to, “Are our eggs free range? Or organic?”, followed by “Are our vegetables, rice, dals, organic?” Answers to all these questions emerged as the students interviewed the dining hall manager and staff. They found out that some of their vegetables come from the vegetable garden on campus (which is organic), the local markets in the nearby town (not organic), while other things like cheese, chocolate, tinned fruit, etc. comes from Bengaluru / Chennai (may or may not be organic). The students then used a map of Andhra Pradesh State to trace their food footprint. The RS students had to include the neighbouring States of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in their map since they do get some of their groceries from Bengaluru and Chennai.
The ZPHS students asked their parents and found that they were sourcing most of their vegetables, fruits, grain, pulses, oilseeds, eggs and meat from within Chittoor district, from their own farms or nearby villages and towns. However when it came to fruits there were several questions: “Where do apples, watermelon, bananas that we eat come from? We don't grow them in our villages?”, “What about potato chips and kurkure? How are they made?”, “We hear that kurkure is not good because it has plastic in it (there was such a rumour in the village)! Is that true?”
Untangling the food web
All the information was documented by the students and at every stage there were a lot of discussions, facilitated collectively by a few teachers from both schools sharing questions and information as we progressed with the project.
We reached a point when it was necessary to take stock of all the information we had collected, and see if we had some answers to our question: Where does our food come from? We did this separately at RS and ZPHS, jointly with the teachers at both the locations.
What the students discovered tumbled out in the form of a whole host of questions and comments. The RS students were surprised at how much goes into what they eat:
Why do we need so many ingredients in our food? We seem to eat a variety of vegetables. We eat a lot of baked snacks. Why do we have to go to Bengaluru to buy some of our fruits and cheese? Why don't we get it locally?
As we made our way through these questions we realised that the school menu was developed based on what we eat at home and what we like eating on special occasions, for example, desserts - chocolate brownies, cakes and cookies. The dining hall manager made monthly trips to Bengaluru to buy things like mozzarella cheese for pizzas which the cooks make as a treat! These are not available locally.
Other questions bubbled up along the way like: I didn't realise there were millets in our desserts and cookies! Why are we growing so much millet on campus? Why don't we grow rice? Why can't we meet all our vegetable and fruit requirements from the vegetable garden? These led to discussions on how millets, paddy, vegetables and fruits are grown. We began to understand how growing crops that need less water or grow under 'rain-fed' conditions and are resistant to droughts must be grown and eaten here so that we can conserve water and eat nutritious food. We also talked about seasonality and the importance of growing and eating food that is suitable for the soil, weather and climate of a particular area. Gradually their questions probed deeper:
Why do we not buy all our vegetables and grain from the surrounding farmers? Why can't we make goat or sheep's milk cheese locally in school or ask the farmers to make it since they have goat and sheep? The farmers must be using a lot more water than us since they do agriculture. If we are in a drought situation where do farmers get water to grow crops? What do people in the village eat?
The questions at ZPHS were a little different, as these children lived at home with their parents unlike the RS students: Why do we need to buy vegetables when we grow many crops on our land? My family eats vegetables only thrice a week. Some of us eat chicken once a week or once a month and mutton only during jatras. In my family we don't buy vegetables because my mother grows beans, pumpkin, chillies and some greens in our kitchen garden. We buy some fruits from fruit sellers in Madanapalle or Angallu but where are these fruits actually grown?
These questions triggered a conversation on eating a variety of foods to get all the nutrients we need for our health. We also wondered whether it was healthier to grow vegetables at home so we know how they are grown, if they are fresh and free from chemicals. But we may not get a wide variety. For instance potatoes (which everybody loves!) don't grow here so we will need to get them from the market.
At this point we found one group of students getting curious about the other’s food habits. Questions on millets and rice were a starting point to these explorations: Why do some people eat millets and others not? I like eating white rice. I like the taste of sankati1. Do RS students eat millets? It would be really nice if the local shops in the village sold 'cup noodles'. We see the advertisement on TV and it looks very tasty. I don't know why we stopped growing paddy. The rice we eat at home is from the Government shop and it smells so we prefer sankati1 because that masks the taste and smell of rice. Do RS students eat rice or chapatis or bread?
Clearly the time had come to share experiences between the two groups. Part 2 of the article will explore how we tried to understand each other through what we eat.
1Sangati / sankati is a local preparation of cooked Ragi and Rice shaped into small balls – a staple of the area.