KidsFoodJourney Week 2: Edible Paintings; Front and Back Smell (Ortho- and Retronasal)

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Week 2

P2 - 4 (Year 1 - 3) Home Lesson Plan

Edible Paintings; Front and Back Smell (Ortho- and Retronasal)

Before starting these activities please read this introduction to KidsFoodJourney, and also the course aims & core concepts outlined in Week 1’s lesson plan.

Lesson outline

  • Tiny Tastes

  • Snacktivity: edible paintings

  • Ortho- and retronasal smell experiment

  • Story-time

Tiny Tastes

We start the lesson with our no-pressure Tiny Tastes experiment: a repetition of the food we tried in week 1. Whether the children want to simply smell it, just lick it, or are happy to eat (any quantity of) the food – that’s fine. Whatever they go for, can they describe what it’s like this time? How does it smell? If they taste it, do they like it better than last time? Does it taste different to them this time? Does it taste more familiar?

Snack-Time Activity: Edible Paintings

The idea for this activity came from these Dutch school taste education lessons that first inspired KidsFoodJourney.

Let’s be artist chefs! Prepare a range of fruit and raw vegetables for the children to make a picture out of (get them to help you do this where possible), and let their imagination do the rest. Remember to smell, feel, taste and observe the ingredients. Look at the seeds in each ingredient.

I like to use a few of the fruits and vegetables we tried in Week 1, to add to the familiarity conversation. They tried them last week…do they prefer them this week? What about sour grapefruit, for example…less of a surprise to the taste buds?

Give each child a sheet of A4 white paper as their ‘canvas’, and a selection of multi-coloured edible ‘paints’. You could use:

  • Cress

  • Thinly sliced peppers of different colours, or celery

  • Grated carrot, beetroot

  • Ribbon courgette with a peeler

  • Strawberries, blueberries, halved grapes

  • Experiment with different ways of chopping something: e.g. carrots in rounds, or sticks, or grated

  • Grapefruit

  • Bright orange, tomato or sliced red cabbage

  • Pomegranate seeds

  • Broccoli or cauliflower florets

When the painting is done, make sure you take a photo of it because now it’s time to tuck in! Which bit of their painting tastes the best, and why? What do they like or not like about certain veg and fruits? Reinforce the fact that we need to try foods multiple times before we have a true idea of whether or not we like them.

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Game 2: Smell and taste experiments

Many thanks to TastEd’s Flavour School Manual for the ideas for these games.

“There is front smell (orthonasal), which happens when you sniff the air, and back smell (retronasal), which happens when you chew food, sending fragrant oils and gases into your nose via the back of your throat. Much of what we think of and experience as taste actually depends on the nose - even though it feels like a taste in our mouth. Smell is just as important as taste in eating!” From TastEd’s Flavour School Manual

Objectives of the game 

The children become familiar with the two types of smell, and how they contribute to their experience of food and flavour.

Set this game up just before playing, so the ingredients retain their strong smells.

Part 1: Orthonasal smell

  • Use a peeler to strip off grapefruit peel, and chop it up a bit to release the zesty smell

  • Bash up a few cloves or cumin seeds

  • Roughly chop some fresh rosemary and basil (separately). You might want to rough these up with a pestle and mortar to release more aroma.

  • Cube a slice of bread and shake over fish sauce

Put these ingredients into five little cups/pots and cover them with cling film or tinfoil. Poke holes in the foil / film.

Hand the pots around, and ask the children if they can guess what’s inside. Give them a shake to wake the flavours. What do the smells remind them of (cloves might smell like Christmas, cumin seeds like curry, basil like pizza sauce, fish sauce like the sea)? Can they rank them in order of (un)pleasantness?

Part 2: Retronasal smell

Into a sixth pot shake a little ground cinnamon over more cubes of bread. Make sure it’s enough to taste clearly of cinnamon, but not so much as to be bitter. Put a lid on the pot.

Ask the child to hold their breath and chew one of the cubes of bread for a couple of seconds, then – without swallowing it – start breathing normally again. They will find that the flavour of the cinnamon suddenly bursts out when they breathe, because the smell/flavour can reach their nose via the back of their throat. This is a great illustration of how much of our sense of taste is actually smell.

A story to finish

We are so lucky at KFJ to have a professional storyteller among our staff. Chris ends every session with an energetic, sometimes musical, always hilarious story about food. Here he is telling the story of the three wishes and the sausage.

We have found the children don’t grow out of loving this – if anything the older ones are even more engaged. We tell a story at the end of KFJ sessions from ages 4 – 11 and all the children love them. You don’t have to be a professional to tell the story of course, just make sure it’s ‘on message’, and not one that teaches children that sweets and cakes are great fun while broccoli is a chore! Be careful also about stories that focus on weight, or sort foods into black and white ‘healthy/unhealthy’ categories. We never talk about weight in KFJ, and avoid telling children that certain foods are better or worse than others. We’re trying to widen their tasting horizons and place a range of foods on a more level playing field for children to learn to genuinely enjoy eating a varied diet.

We’re collecting food stories with positive messages here, some of which are linked to YouTube videos if you’d prefer to outsource the storytelling!

Kit List:

  • Your chosen Tiny Tastes ingredient

  • Fruit and vegetables for edible painting

  • A few slices of bread

  • 6 pots, one with a lid

  • Smell ingredients: grapefruit peel, cloves / cumin seeds, fresh rosemary, fresh basil, fish sauce, ground cinnamon

  • Tinfoil or cling film

  • Sheets of plain white paper for your edible painting

  • Scissors for cress

  • A peeler to ribbon courgette, if you like