We have seen that the kitchen offers many possibilities of personal growth, experimentation and learning for children.
I will now focus on other fields that we can explore with the saucepan and the spoon in my hand from the age of four, when the children have already acquired a sufficient understanding of the language and can playfully enter other areas of learning.
Geography, History and the particularities of each culture they are one of these areas, perhaps the least obvious, but, in my opinion, one of the most rich and possibilities for values education About human diversity
History and Geography in the kitchen
Although it seems that these matters, Geography and History, and, in general, cultural diversityThey are alien to what we eat, they are precisely one of the elements that we can most easily work in the kitchen.
When let's use an ingredient We can introduce an explanation of its origin, telling how it is produced, how it is transformed or commercialized until it reaches us and even speaks of the use that other peoples have given it. I will give you some examples and I propose to accompany those images evoked in your speech with children's books, drawings or movies, to turn that first approach to an ingredient into a complete and unforgettable experience.
The history of some ingredients
The salt It was a currency before the money existed, as it was essential to be able to preserve food in the past. Spices, which now fill our kitchen, were a luxury item that created great trade routes and were the conduit through which different cultures related.
Camel caravans crossed Asia to get them, they even drove Europeans to explore new trade routes by sea, cementing the Spanish and Portuguese empires in America and the East, opening the way for geographical discoveries, an improvement in navigation and a transformation of the modern world
They came to us from America potatoes, tomatoes, peppers and cocoa, things without which today we can barely understand food.
The cookies they prepared for the sailors to have portions that were not spoiled and when they spent months at sea, scurvy, a disease caused by the absence of vitamin C, made them understand the need for fresh products to maintain health.
Cultural diversity
Cultural diversity It has a lot to do with what you eat in each place, but also with what you can't eat. In India they do not eat beef, Jews and Muslims do not eat pork, most Europeans feel disgust towards insects or horse meat, in China the dog is a delicacy and some African people consider fried termites a better treat than the caviar
Milk of other species It is not something that many people consider taking and also, millions of people produce rejection and intolerance, because being able to digest it is an adaptation and not normal. In Africa there are villages that feed on the blood of their cattle, the Eskimos ate seal, the ancient Hispanics used acorns as a food base.
Each agricultural civilization has based its food on a cereal. Corn, rice, wheat, rye and sorghum are some cereals that we can now find normally in the kitchen, but hundreds of years ago they were only consumed in their original regions. The Romans considered that conquering barn countries, such as Egypt or Sicily, was indispensable to keep the urban people calm and fed, while the Italian farmers were forced into servitude by internal wars.
Farming
Also, the kitchen allows us to talk about the Agriculture. The ancient world, without using machines, needed slavery to maintain production, but in the Middle Ages the market economy drew back to autarchy in large estates that remained without the need to consume products purchased outside.
We can imagine, see in books and even experiment with our hands how it is cultivated with manual procedures and then approach to see a field in current exploitation, also playing with tractors, harvesters and other elements of an agricultural belt that are usually a toy with enormous success for the children
To start, I start with these ideas, but With a little research we can make the kitchen one of the best classrooms in History That we can conceive.
Geography
In addition, we can explain many concepts about Human Geography and Economy, analyzing how food is produced, how it is prepared in factories, distributed or sold in stores, also entering into concepts such as fair trade, industrialization, forms of production, subsistence agriculture, types of livestock and livestock, organic farming and the human impact on the environment.
A good idea is to put a world map in the kitchen and go pasting or pricking drawings that we cut with different foods and dishes for children to recognize. In this way children get used to knowing the parts of the world, the climates that are in each one, the cultures and the products that are given in each part.
With these ideas we can introduce concepts about History and Geography in the wonderful learning laboratory that is cooking.
