Food education and school gardens

Eating is an instinct, but 'what and how to eat' is a product of learning. Which tastes we like, what we associate with health, how we enjoy food — these senses are shaped largely by early experience. Food education is the teaching that cultivates this 'capacity to eat.' Beyond conveying nutritional knowledge, it aims, through the whole experience of sowing, tending, harvesting, cooking and tasting, to let children become able to choose their own food.

In the context of urban farming, food education matters because a garden makes the best 'classroom.' A child who knows vegetables only as supermarket packs sows seeds in soil, faces insects and rain, and harvests with their own hands. That experience gives a bodily answer to the question of where food 'comes from.' A school garden is a rare place of learning where science, social studies and home economics cross, and food, environment and community can be learned all at once.

The phenomenon that 'growing it yourself makes you able to eat it' has been confirmed in several studies. Children who take part in school-garden programmes tend to show increased liking and intake of vegetables, more food-related knowledge, and greater willingness to try new ingredients. The keys are that taste grows through 'repeated exposure,' and the psychology by which people rate favourably the things they had a hand in.

From here we go deeper into how children 'become able to eat,' from both the science of taste (why children dislike bitterness, and how they come to like it) and the science of learning (why experience beats knowledge). In the second half we then visit the school gardens around the world that have implemented these principles as educational policy, and finally close the whole series as a cycle of urban farming.