Thank you to all of the whānau for your help and support. Our students have been learning about different foods and how to pickle, salt, smoke and cook. We’ve made everything from baking bread, sauerkraut, pickled vegetables to ginger and orange syrup. These were all available for students to have a taste.
It was wonderful to see foods from different cultures and family recipes. It encouraged some great discussion!
As part of our new Inquiry we have been exploring the history of food, how the way human development has changed what, and how we eat.
Timeline of our first thoughts around human development and food.
Although we have just started work on this, here are some of the things we found out.
The Paleolithic era, a time of the hunter gatherers saw early hominids eating what they collected; fruit, berries, roots, fungi, grains and occasionally meat including small reptiles and insects. The main form of processing food was cooking using fire. Evidence suggests this began about 2.5 million years ago. As well as this some foods may have been preserved by fermenting, possibly burying it; drying or salting.
About 10, 000 years ago the Neolithic era saw people begin to farm. They ceased to roam looking for food but cultivated crops (Horticulture) and began to keep animals (Pastoralism).
We are going to keep exploring the technologies involved with processing and preparing foods including fermenting, salting and making cheese to preserve milk.
We are going to learn more about how food is processed and prepared and then we want to have a celebration of food in which we bring and share food connected to us. Keep an eye out for details.
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John told us to come back in an hour and 10 minutes, but he didn't tell us why…
