Food on the table

Let’s make the theme for this month as food and for next month the theme would be waste. Whatever the theme may be, I am trying to elicit your responses from a learning perspective.

Who we are today has no bearing as to who we were as babies except we started of our life by consuming milk, mother’s or manufactured. When mother’s milk is analyzed for its composition, a great percentage of it are fat, protein, sugar and carbohydrates. As opposed to these macro nutrients, vitamins form a great percentage micro nutrients.

We later get introduced to solid food. We start consuming them in all sorts of shape, size, texture, flavor and taste. In essence, they all have the same set of macro nutrients that we find in milk, but percentages vary vastly. Some foods become exotic and exorbitant. They get classified as organic as opposed to what, I don’t know. When we classify ourselves as organic matter, are we eating something that is not organic? Does this question make any sense?

These type of questions don’t make sense for some and for few others, it will. How the world has been morphed into a civilized world that we see today us amazing, but it has happened over many  centuries. Morphing got accelerated only after the industrialization towards mass production creeped into mass producing food both in its raw form and in its readily edible form.

Many sets of learning has happened over the years to create skills that eventually created the world we see today. We open the pantry and the fridge to select from hundreds of ingredients in various stages of their morphing, and start  cooking using various forms of heat, diverse set of appliances to produce textures that we want, and various processes to provide flavor profiles that we like to have. A dwindling small percentage pick from gardens or farms to cook food and we tend to categorize that as rustic cooking. In the end, we either eat what we have cooked or throw it out if it has become unpleasant to eat. Modern day living provides recipes to avoid preparing un-eatable foods.

If we now stop and think about this basic activity of preparing food and start to list all the skills that we have to have, it poses some interesting questions. How much of it came from educational institutions, how much from experimenting and how much from observing the same activity performed by others?

The learning could be haphazard, but we ended up in one outcome – food on the table that we can eat.

As the world gets more complex, more connected, giving more access to food from land, sea and air, are we priming our next generation not to learn by providing them search engines to get out of fix, hand tools that dwindle over time in preparing food, preparing food in as less number of steps as possible by morphing food even more to a form that, one day, cooks by itself when it is taken out of its storage?