Lucinda Bennet reflects on vegetable appreciation and learning by doing.

This is an extract from our food newsletter, The boil.

When you pull a carrot from the ground, it makes a certain noise, a sort of “pop” as the tip comes off the root cap. This is something you can only know if you have harvested carrots yourself, which I did several times in September when volunteer at the Kelmarna Community Farm. Sometimes a carrot wouldn’t burst, wouldn’t leave the earth at all, and would snap in half, revealing the shock of the orange at its center and a whiff of the most potent carrot scent imaginable, sweet and grassy like spring itself. .

After just a few days of harvesting and washing carrots, I gained a new appreciation for the ones I ate. I marveled at their different shapes and sizes, at the different softness between the inner core and the outer cortex. In fact, since I started volunteering in Kelmarna, helping to grow kai from seed to harvest, my appreciation for each vegetable I eat has deepened. Did you know that it takes about four months to grow a full-sized cabbage? A little less than half the time it takes to grow a baby. About the same length as the average pig’s gestation. A cabbage is a precious thing; every vegetable is a miracle.

Around the same time I was pulling carrots, research was published in the UK, revealing that less than a third of primary school-aged children were able to identify common vegetables. Naturally, I wondered how our tamariki here in Aotearoa might fare in such a study. Even if the presence and growth of school gardens, outdoor classrooms And food education programs is encouraging, huge budget cuts to programs like Ka Ora, Ka Ako could see the disappearance of many incredible initiatives designed by schools to meet the specific needs of their ākonga, like this sustainable model, tuakana/teina at Te Pā o Rākaihautū, or the waste reduction system at the Portland school, where lunch plays a central role in their current school-wide investigation into the origin of kai.

Where does Kai come from? Well, there is the garden, the farm, the river, the sea; but it’s not that simple in this age of globalization, imports and exports, kai grown in labs, kai that look almost nothing like kai. In the last episode of Home educationwe meet the Baker whānau who live and learn on their farm in Hiruhārama, Tairāwhiti. Watching these whānau work together in the māra, herding the horses, the tamariki learning to arrange the kūmara tubers in a barrel like “a school of fish”, I think of what it might be like to grow up knowing where it comes from the kai on your plate, because you planted it, cultivated it and harvested it. I know it’s not revolutionary, but for a city kid whose kūmara always comes from the supermarket, it kind of is, especially with numerous studies showing that children – and adults – who grow their own fruit and vegetables are more likely to eat them.

At the beginning of the episode, Israel Baker explains how his children started learning at home after a whale washed up in Tokomaru Bay and they took the children out of school for a few weeks to learn the traditional Maori practices in the surrounding area. whale butcheringharvesting the taonga from the tohorā. When truancy officers came knocking, they decided to keep the children at home, realizing the importance of what they could learn through hands-on experiences on land and sea. Although this type of education may not be possible for all whānau, it seems there is something – a lot – we can learn from the Bakers, perhaps by seeing the educational value inherent in the tasks linked to the maintenance of life, in the fact that tamariki never becomes tamariki. alienated from Te Taiao in the first place because they do not know the sound a carrot makes when it is pulled from the earth.