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When my son was two and three years old, he was fascinated by food (even if, like many toddlers, he went on at least one hunger strike each week), so I sought a way to blend food with multicultural play. Here are some of the more interesting items I turned up–stuff you don’t see everyday, but that could spark some fun and imaginative conversations with your kids or students in preschool through the primary grades.
Cookbooks
The Kids’ Multicultural Cookbook: Food & Fun Around the World: The School Library Journal offers this review of this cookbook:
“In this whirlwind tour of 41 countries, readers are given a quick dose of culture from each one. There are one or two recipes (their difficulty is rated by one, two, or three spoons) for each place and an introduction to a child who lives there. Occasional riddles and “fun facts” are inserted, such as the world record for watermelon-seed spitting. Foreign words are included with pronunciations. Readers are encouraged to try home-baked tortilla chips, ginger ale made from ginger root, and peanut butter soup. The writing style is breezy and inviting, and the illustrations are a combination of black-and-white cartoons and photographs.”
I’m kind of awkward in the kitchen, so a cookbook targeted at kids is just about my speed. I haven’t been able to flip through this book myself, but I have seen other books in the Multicultural Kids series, and they’re definitely worth the purchase price.
The Multicultural Cookbook for Students: The School Library Journal has this to say:
This is the reference tool librarians have longed for-a single volume that presents dishes from 122 nations. Albyn and Webb have organized their book into seven sections devoted to countries that share similar cooking styles and traditions. Each begins with a bit of general data about the country or region with emphasis on the foods grown and prepared there, cooking utensils, and a tiny bit about the culture of the people. Recipes are introduced with specific information about their country of origin, especially its food production and general dietary practices. The number of servings, a clear and complete list of ingredients, equipment needed, and step-by-step directions are included. Serving suggestions are provided, but there is no nutritional breakdown. Kitchen procedures are briefly discussed with the essentials for safety and health covered. One drawback is that even though the book is addressed specifically to young people, it has no pictures other than outline maps showing the location of the country discussed. Nonetheless, it is a useful, practical, one-stop source guide to the world’s favorite foods.
Multicultural Cookbook of Life-Cycle Celebrations: The idea for this cookbook is terrific. Instead of offering decontextualized recipes from around the world, the author tells us about the different cultural milestones being celebrated or otherwise marked by the preparation and consumption of this food. The book contains more than 500 recipes.
The American Ethnic Cookbook For Students: Of this book, Booklist says,
Because of the continuing flow of immigrants into the U.S, almost nothing edible can any longer be considered foreign to these shores. Each immigrant group has brought its culture with its baggage, and culture usually means cooking habits. Mark Zanger has produced a comprehensive guide documenting each immigrant band’s contributions to American cooking. Even some of the tiniest, least-known groups find a place at the table here: Estonians, Nigerians, Gypsies, and Macedonians, to name just a handful. For each immigrant group, Zanger gives a historical introduction and then a few sample recipes. Recipes strive to be authentic without resorting to ingredients unavailable in reasonably comprehensive supermarkets. This practical, useful reference book is a boon to any teacher seeking tasty ways to induce students to celebrate ethnic diversity, and Zanger’s annotated bibliography adds still more value to his efforts.
This book offers the opportunity to talk with your children about how cuisines change when they migrate; different foods are available in different parts of the world, and people’s tastes may change as they are exposed to other cultures’ foods. This book might also spark a discussion of where the foods your child eats are grown, along with a discussion of the environmental impact of the shipping of that food to the supermarket. You also might talk about your family’s own culinary history; how much does what you eat hew to “authentic” cuisine from the countries from which your family came?
There’s also a whole series of cookbooks titled Cooking the _______ Way, for example Cooking the Thai Way, Cooking the Russian Way. Try this Amazon search to find them.
Play food
International Bread Set: This item features mostly American and Western European breads, but it still might spark some interesting discussions with your children about how bread is made and consumed around the world. If your children are interested in the environment, you could segue into conversations about how grains are grown and used. Discussions around corn can be really interesting; see, for example, Michael Pollan’s book (for adults) The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.
Learning Resources New Sprouts Multicultural Food Set (15 pieces): This set includes a sushi roll, samosa, bowl of rice, pizza slice, taco, avocado, pita, croissant, cheese, two edamame, two shrimp, and two slices of kiwifruit. Again, here’s an opportunity to talk to your children about how different foods are made and why ingredients vary from culture to culture.
Along the same lines are this 10-piece soft sushi play set, Melissa & Doug’s (easier to clean) wooden sushi slicing play set, Melissa & Doug’s Fill & Fold Taco & Tortilla set, a stir-fry set featuring a wok full of healthy veggies, and this seafood play set that’s nicely contained in a basket.
Extending learning
The most important thing is not that you purchase these specialty toys—after all, you could cut photos of food out of magazines, print them out from the web, or draw or sculpt them with your child—but that you talk with your kids about why different cultures eat different foods.
Here are some questions you might ask children as you’re cooking or playing with the toy food, depending on their age and interest. It’s less important that young kids get the right answers than that they start thinking about the larger world, how different parts of the world have different kinds of resources and practices, and how different cultures eat different foods that might be unfamiliar to them but still might be delicious.
- What do these kinds of foods need to grow? (e.g., fertile soil, appropriate temperatures, water) What parts of the world do you think have those things?
- How do people harvest this food? What kinds of tools do you think they use? Do you think they use machines? What do you think those tools or machines look like, and where do they get them?
- How do families get this food if they don’t grow it themselves? (e.g. barter, communal farming, farmer’s markets, or supermarkets)?
- Which foods do you think are healthiest? Why?
- If you could grow any kind of food at school or home, what would you choose to grow, and why? What kind of meal would you prepare using it?
- You might also share folk beliefs about certain foods being, for example, more likely to help people have babies or bring good luck.
