18 Food and Cooking as Art
Chantelle Warner
Level:
Beginning/Intermediate
Keywords:
description ⧫ adjectives ⧫ food ⧫ cooking ⧫ preference & habits
Summary:
This multi-day lesson explores our relationship with and habits related to food. In particular, the role of food in our lives as aesthetic experiences, which engage our five senses. This creates opportunities for students to reflect on their own preferences and how those are shaped not only by nutritional needs, but through cultural influences and personal predilections. On the first day, students reflect on these more generally. This sets the foundation for the students’ explorations of how art can make our relationships with food and eating visible through the use of different compositional designs. Whether or not students have access to an art gallery for this set of lessons, they can consider how different media convey various dimensions of what food means for us and for others.
Learning objectives:
- Can talk about eating habits and preferences
- Can reflect on the ways in which our eating habits and preferences are influenced by health and cultural factors.
- Can describe the dishes in detail using all five senses.
- Can, in connection to these functions, read simple texts, analyze and draft, for example, restaurant review, web pages.
DAY 1: Food as Culture
This first set of activities is designed to invite students to use language they will typically have learned in a chapter on eating and drinking to begin to reflect on their own habits and preferences and the ways in which those are shaped through culture and society.
Discussing our eating habits
This discussion can be done first as a pair or small group activity in class or as a homework assignment to be brought into class. In online and hybrid classes, it also works well as a discussion board. Important is that these individual responses build in some way towards comparisons and ultimately toward a sense of commonalities and differences within the class. For example, this can be done by gathering answers on a board in the classroom and asking students to create graphic organizers representing the classroom trends.
A. What do you eat? What do you drink?
Discuss the following questions with your partner.
- What do you like to eat? What don’t you like to eat?
- What do you like to drink? What don’t you like to drink?
- What do you like to eat or drink for breakfast?
- What do you like to eat or drink for lunch?
- What do you like to eat or drink for dinner?
- What do you like to eat or drink for dessert?
- Do you have a favorite dish? If yes, what?
- Do you have a favorite drink? If yes, what?
B. What do we eat?
Compare your answers with your classmates. Which similarities do you see? Are there typical meals for our class? Which dishes do we consider to be our favorite? Gather your answers in the following table.
| Food category | Answers |
| Meat dishes |
|
| Noodle dishes |
|
| Vegetable dishes |
|
| Seafood/Fish dishes |
|
| Soups