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?

Back 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.

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- mon”. This taught them that the senses of smell and taste need to be separated – first the nose, then the mouth.

The next step was to present them with two small glasses containing a little oil, labelled A (for awful) and B (for brilliant), asking them what each oil reminded them of and finally whether they rated it as good or bad. There were a variety of answers: some said that Sample A reminded them of the pasta with olive oil they would be served in the school canteen, others that Sample B reminded them of “when we mow the grass to make hay for our cattle” (ah, that famous “green fruitiness”!), a couple of them mentioned that it reminded them of when they press olives (I later found out that their grandparents had an olive press in another part of the country).

We then went on to draw up a list of the perceptions that each of them had come up with through their senses of smell and taste, writing them on the blackboard and dividing them – using what was a typically scholastic approach, at least when I was at school and which is perhaps no longer in use today –into “good” and “bad”.

At subsequent meetings, I brought along various oils, which the kids classified using the list they had drawn up at the first session. As I recall, there were three sessions, and at the end I presented them with a Budding Taster Diploma, which they were very proud of. The most amazing surprise came when they gave me an album with all the drawings they had made, as a memento of our sessions, and which I still cherish to this day.

The experience was repeated in the years that followed, again involving classes from Year Four. It was very interesting, as when the fourth graders repeated the tasting experience the following year, in Year Five, without any introduction, except for getting them to recall what they had learned the year before, they proved to be true experts, correctly assessing most of the oils I had brought along with me.

Gradually, we refined the structure of the sessions down to the following:

Lesson 1: Brief introduction to olive oil: overview of history and technology (20-25 minutes), first approach to sensory awareness: practical use of the senses of smell and taste

Lesson 2: Guided tasting of oils with and without defects, tasting of two different types of oil

Lesson 3: Find the Intruder!, a blind tasting of a small series of olive oils, including trying to identify the one with defects. One adverse effect was that some children at home rejected the family’s choice of olive oil, but I regard this as a positive effect, as it led to awareness of one of our most valuable foodstuffs spreading like wildfire. They enjoyed the pilot experience and so it expanded both in terms of space, in the sense that it was extended to several other schools in the region, and in terms of time, because as part of an event dedicated to olive oil that takes place every year in Oleis, near Udine, an initiative was carried out with the primary schools of the nearby municipality of Manzano, an experience that ended with a collective tasting at the event itself, on the Saturday morning. This whole experience lasted for a good five years, I would reckon, and was only interrupted due to a series of organisational problems caused by complex planning and safety regulations that gradually made it impossible to hold such events. The project gained popularity, spreading up to a good number of middle schools throughout the region. It goes without saying that with these older kids the approach was more advanced and prior to meeting me, the pupils were taught about food and fats, particularly by their science teachers, with whom I agreed on a special syllabus. This new section proved to be extremely useful, giving a boost to the olive oil tasting part of the experience. And even though quite a few of the children initially turned up their noses at the idea of tasting olive oil, once they had found out that extra-virgin olive oil varies from place to place, that each one has its own distinctive character, they became proactive, bringing along the olive oil that they used at home. This would very often not be shop-bought, but purchased directly from producers in geographical areas outside Friuli Venezia Giulia.

With the middle school students, we used a less structured scale than that of the official method, drawn up on the blackboard, re- cording the value expressed by each student, and then ultimately working out the median, as if it were a real tasting panel; afterwards, for each sample, we commented on the results together, raising some interesting points for discussion – for example: how acceptable was its bitterness or how intense was its pungency/piquancy, with a couple of reflections on the latter attribute, i.e.: what is pungent? What do we mean by pungent? For some of them pungent meant something like horseradish, while piquant (or hot) conjured up the idea of chili pepper. Finally, some work was done with secondary schools, mainly agricultural, vocational and technical institutes and, as was to be expected, in this case the conversation with the students was far more technical, as they generally have an in-depth grounding in agricultural sciences, which allowed us to connect various sensory characteristics to factors such as the harvest or the biochemical evolutions that can occur in the post-harvest phase. With these schools, we also had the opportunity to discuss and sometimes even debunk many of the clichés commonly associated with the quality of oil.

In conclusion, this was a series of varied, but always positive experiences and – where primary schools are concerned – rather surprising. Perhaps the idea of raising generations of consumers who are aware of what quality is – and how to recognise it – could truly be a powerful weapon for promoting quality products and managing to get rid of many of the poor-quality products on the markets.