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Units January 22, 2025

Decolonizing Your Diet

Lesson Summary: Students explore world cultures through studying ingredients and food cultures brought to the United States due to slavery, colonization, and internal migration. Downloads: Unit resources
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This unit was created by the Fremont Tigers, as part of the 2022 cohort of The 1619 Project Education Network. It is designed for facilitation across approximately 15 50-minute class periods.

Objectives

  • Students will be tasked with describing/recognizing enduring aspects of slavery and colonization in modern society through studying how American food culture has evolved with the United States’ participation in slavery and colonization.
  • Students will assess how colonized cultures regain cultural, psychological, and economic freedom lost due to colonization.
  • After assessing decolonizing methods, that may include storytelling, art pieces, self determination, and increased knowledge of and recognition of their role in the development of American culture, to name a few things, students will mirror these practices for themselves.
  • Use learned knowledge and methods of decolonization to dismantle oppressive systems, for example, developing a deeper understanding of gentrification in order to combat it.
  • Recognize the history of foods/dishes based on individual ingredients’ origin and history.
  • Expand practical/tangible aspects of world history. For example, rather than just learning that enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas, we will learn how the existence of common items such as rice and okra are an enduring effect of enslaved Africans being brought to the Americas.

Unit Overview

The food and culture project is overall an ethnography project. Students explore world cultures through studying the ingredients and food cultures brought to the United States due to the country's history of slavery, colonization, and internal migration. The goal is to build world history content knowledge by looking at food as a specific enduring effect of historic events.

Skills that students will primarily practice include the exploration of community and cultural wealth through family interviews, shadowing, and journaling during meal prep. Students will also create lessons for peer instruction and assessment that highlight their family’s food culture.

Writing is also a skill that will be developed as students will use primary historical sources as references while creating their own primary sources.

The scope and sequence for this lesson include:

  • Social and cultural wealth and learning.
  • Ethnography and the exploration of world cultures and cuisines.

Skills include:

  • Research (ingredients and historic origins of those ingredients, especially in certain locations in the world, ex. the introduction of rice, okra, yams, etc into the North American diet)
  • Teaching (creating instructions for student-taught cooking lessons, delivering instructions, providing an assessment based on lesson created )
  • Analyzing primary sources related to world cultures and cuisines
  • Accessing community knowledge (researching family/cultural food culture and history, conducting family interviews on food culture and practices, learning family recipes with the intention of sharing them and their histories with the class

The pedagogical vision of this unit includes:

  • Decolonization (reclaiming knowledge and skills that may have been lost or devalued due to colonization and increased knowledge of cultural identities)
  • Awareness and appreciation of other cultures and their overall contribution to American food culture
  • World history content knowledge through the lens of understanding and assessing food/ingredient migration rather than directly studying the political or military history of nations and cultures.

Essential question:

  • How did dishes and ingredients make it to other parts of the world?
  • How have food/ingredients migrated with people?
  • What were the circumstances of that migration?
  • How does food connect us with the past?
  • How does food pull us into the future?

Performance Task

Final assessment – Leading the class through a lesson about the history of a dish and instruction on preparations. The lesson can be presented in multiple ways, for example, Powerpoint, poster, infographics, etc. Required information includes:

  • Place of origin for ingredients in the dish
  • How the ingredients were brought to the US
  • Who brought the ingredients to the US
  • How was the ingredient used through history
  • Creation of a primary source narrative about their personal history with the food (favorite dish, traditional meal,  how/why they feel that their food/ingredients are unique to their culture, mom’s favorite meal, etc)
  • What is their personal connection to this food? Why did they choose it?
  • Instruction on how to prepare the meal 

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