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Talking About Food

This is a pretty simple lesson that just involves discussing food from different perspectives. It can be used as part of a lesson, or supplemented with activities, games, and so on. I found this was a good lesson to do when I was still getting to know students because it is a pretty universal topic and as a foreigner in a foreign country, students love telling me about their traditional food! I talk about US foods and holidays here because I am American but obviously it could be used to talk about your own native cuisine instead.

Materials

• Discussion Questions

To prepare, put pictures of some typical American food on the board. For example:
but without the captions. Ask students to guess what these typical foods are. Then explain that in the US we also eat a lot of international foods. See if they can guess where these typical "American" foods come from.

Now ask students to name some of their national foods. Prompt them to describe the food in detail: what it is made out of, how it is made, how it is eaten, what it looks like, what it tastes like, etc. If you are familair with their national cusisine you can prompt them. If you are not familair, you can use your ignorance to elicit details. You can also get into what international foods have been absorbed into their culture and are now typical foods.

Now tell them about Thanksgiving briefly, emphasizing that it is a harvest festival and many families eat native American food. Put up a list of some traditional Thanksgiving food and foods native to the Americas, such as: turkey, squash, potatoes, corn, pumpkin pie, apple pie, tomatoes. Students might be quite shocked to learn that potatoes or tomatoes come from the New World originally!

Have students come up with either a similar harvest festival or a holiday associated with special foods that you only eat on that day. Prompt them to describe these foods again in detail: what is it made of, what does it look like, what does it taste like, etc. This can lead to lively disagreements about what makes a particular dish good, or some regional or ethnic variants. This can also lead into a discussion of national holidays.

Finally, hand out the Discussion Questions and have students discuss them in pairs or small groups. At the end, bring everyone together and discuss some of the more interesting points.

As homework or a followup, I ask students to write down instructions for making some kind of food (obviously you have to watch out in case they just copy a recipe)
If you have access to a kitchen, one fun activity is to have students bring in their instructions and then swap them and have another student try to follow them. This forces students to be very detailed and prompts students to ask questions of each other. An easy alternative to this activity in order to avoid buying lots of food would be to have students write instructions for the same food. Then you can have a small party in class when you taste the results!

For another lesson plan on the same theme, check out At the Resturant which includes a discussion of restaurants and a fun roleplay.

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