Oil lessons
Kids – like cats with their food by Lanfranco Conte, Chairman of the Italian Society for the Study of Fatty Substances, former full professor of Food Chemistry
“In what way?”, you might ask. Yes, it is worth clarifying, by taking a look at - and following - the approach our feline friends take. Would our way of relating to food and olive oil change if we too learnt to assess each food using our senses of smell and taste?
B
ack in the early 2000s, I was visited by a delegation from an association called ‘“Mangiare bene per crescere sani” (Eating well to grow up healthy). Founded by parents and teachers at a primary school in Moruzzo, near the north-western Italian city of Udine, the association had set up a series of meetings with children from the final two years of primary school. These meetings focussed on learning about nutrition as interactively as possible, so as to capture the children’s attention with practical activities. One of the foods they had identified was extra-virgin olive oil, which is why they had contacted me. It seemed like a very worthwhile idea. I have
2004 - 2018, TWELVE YEARS OF PROJECTS BRINGING EXTRAVIRGIN OLIVE OIL INTO PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOL CLASSROOMS, AS NARRATED BY THE AUTHOR
always firmly believed that an effective strategy to help reduce the amount of substandard or poor-quality products on the market is for us all to be taught how to spot them, so that they will be left to rot on the shelves, and ultimately be pushed out of the market. Nevertheless, I had a number of concerns – throughout my working life, I had always been asked to explain concepts to adults, or young adults when teaching at university, but never to such young children. Anyway, I agreed to have a go. The class I met was in Year 5, and they had been well taught, having previously been given an age-appropriate course in natural sciences and nutrition. There I was, standing in front of a class of highly motivated, interested and competent children, and yet... I had no idea how to connect with them! How does a Year 5 child think? What are they interested in? At the turn of the 21st century, what sort of language gets through to them? I had made a PowerPoint presentation for the meeting and when I plugged my computer into the projector my desktop showed up on the screen. It had a picture of my cat on it, and this immediately caught the attention and enthusiasm of the children, which made me realise this would be a good way of introducing the topic. 28
Having made the appropriate introductions (the cat’s name, her age, etc.), I went on to share some, shall we say, reflections with the class: even as children, we are told by our parents and teachers what we can eat and what we can’t, what is tasty and what is not, but what about cats? What do cats do when food is put in front of them? They smell it carefully, then occasionally lick it before eating. In other words, they make full use of their senses to assess the food. Well, say I, we ought to do what cats do, learn from them how to make judgments about food, using our sense of smell and taste as well, with the big difference that cats, in their proven superiority to humans, have a much keener sense of smell and taste than we do, and that we therefore have to listen very carefully to what our nose and mouth tell us. It worked a treat! The children, many of whom were also cat owners, enthusiastically agreed to “do it like cats” and were more than willing to “listen” to their noses and mouths. I started with the classic test of getting them to hold their nose and put a mixture of sugar and cinnamon in their mouth, and then tell me what they could sense inside their mouth. Of course, the answer was “a sweet taste”, so then I got them to let go of their noses and asked them again what they could sense, at which point they said “cinna-
