The Makings of a Meal

While our country may feel polarized at times, food remains a place people can come together to learn about each other and their cultures.

That was teacher Grace D’Antuono’s hypothesis when she created a hands-on project for her seventh-grade humanities students at High Tech Middle Chula Vista.

“We are a project-based learning school,” D’Antuono says. “We try to be nontraditional and create a fun learning environment for students.”

The project, Makings of a Meal, is divided into three units over the course of a semester and asks: What do we eat? How is it produced? How does it arrive at our tables? These are complicated concepts for 12-year-olds when combined with challenging environmental and food justice issues.

Upon completion of the three units, the students hold an exhibition to share their discoveries with friends and family. Adriana, 12, says, “I learned that food has a story. I liked this project because we went below the surface. Now we know there is more to a dish and how it gets to the grocery store; we went deeper.”

Adriana speaks three languages—Spanish, Korean, and English— and says her father crosses the border daily.

The seventh-grade class reflects changing American demographics: 49% are Hispanic/Latinx; 25% are Asian/Pacific Islander; 17% are Indigenous; 12% are white; and 7% are Black.

Given the diversity of her students, D’Antuono started the project with a case study that looked at food as part of culture. Unit one explored the history of the Kumeyaay, the first people to live in our region. The Kumeyaay fished, hunted deer and other animals, and were known for basket weaving and pottery. They had sophisticated practices in agriculture and animal husbandry, maintained wild animal stocks, controlled erosion and overgrowth, built dams, managed watersheds, and stored groundwater before being the first to meet Spanish colonial fleets who sailed into what is now San Diego Harbor back in 1542.

Dylan, 12, says, “They [the Kumeyaay] ate squirrels, acorns, and fish until the Spanish invaders came and enslaved them. Americans put [them] on reservations, gave them rations, and introduced sugar to their diets. Before long, their food was forgotten and [also] part of their identity.”

The students’ experience with food at home helped shape this part of the project, D’Antuono says. Many students help with cooking and say they have a specific dish that tells the story of who their family is and how they celebrate special events. In Adriana’s family, for example, Bistec Koreana is a dish that reflects her Mexican-Korean background. D’Antuono shares her background as an Italian American through a recipe for gnocchi that the students tried to make in class. Mikey, 12, says, “It didn’t really turn out.” The next classroom cooking experience fared better. The students were divided into groups to make familiar brunch dishes: scrambled eggs, bacon and toast, pancakes, and fruit salad.

Other students worked on a geography and math problem, researching the brunch ingredients, such as where the pigs for the bacon were raised and processed and how many miles they traveled to reach Chula Vista.

In the second unit, the students further studied where food comes from and how we are connected to food origins, including an in-depth look at the history and untold stories of the United Farm Workers movement in California.

“Food origins are important to teach because so often we forget that other hands have touched our food before our own,” D’Antuono says. “We might think of a farm or a factory where food is washed and processed, but how often do we truly stop to think about the person who harvested our food or the hard work that went into planting the ingredients of what we eat.”

In the final unit, the students learned about the nuances of food access. To make the concept come alive, the students spent a morning at Coastal Roots Farm in Encinitas where they were divided into small groups to complete a cooking challenge. Some of the groups received partial ingredients, tools, and directions to make a salad. Other groups received a limited set of tools and no instructions, and one group received everything needed to complete the assignment.

After the salads were completed and tasted, the students discussed the concept of food inequality and that it not only means unequal access to food, it can also mean a lack of culturally significant foods or knowledge about how to use certain ingredients.

“Access doesn’t equal success—you also have to know what to do with the ingredients and how to cook them,” a Coastal Roots Farm educator said.

After a farm tour, the kids participated in a food mapping exercise where they drew maps to indicate where their school was, where their home was in relation to school, and the places they get food, including grocery stores, convenience stores, and restaurants. While many maps looked similar because the students attend the same school, the difference in proximity to food was a tangible example of food inequality and the existence of food deserts.

D’Antuono says an important part of project-based learning is bringing what her students learned to life for the larger school community. The Makings of a Meal exhibition and student magazine featured examples of their best work and discoveries during the course of the semester.

As part of the exhibition, chef Joann Stabile of Victoria Ranch Events created an in-classroom restaurant experience serving short ribs and polenta to the class, the school, families, and community partners in attendance.

“Chef Joann and two staff cooked a delicious meal for our restaurant experience at the exhibition. They donated everything, and they even brought cutlery and plates,” D’Antuono says. “It was so generous and really took our exhibition over the top.”

Similar to an actual meal, the Makings of a Meal project is made up of several ingredients: What starts as a lesson in humanities expands to incorporate math, geography, critical thinking, and collaboration.

“That’s what I hope the kids take away and [what] we are practicing in the classroom,” D’Antuono says.