Education student designs lesson plans to take a bite out of food marketing

Instead of apples, Emma Caronte is handing out lesson plans on local food history to Manitoba teachers this back-to-school season.

The undergraduate researcher spent her summer break creating a social studies unit that investigates food guide evolution, marketing tactics and how honey dill sauce became a pantry staple on the Prairies.

“I want students to develop a greater interest in food and what outside influences affect their choices and what we consider ‘healthy,’” said Caronte, a final-year education student at the University of Manitoba.

She is advertising her 112-page project as a user-friendly resource for classroom teachers and “a fun sub plan” targeted at Grade 6, 7, 8 and 9.

In the flagship assignment, students must pick a popular dish, such as borscht, bison or lumpia, and find out when and why it started being served in Manitoba.

The package includes slide shows, worksheets and a guide with provincial curriculum outcomes that apply to every activity.

Caronte, 22, said the content will make mouths water, but it will also help students think more critically about advertisements, learn to appreciate multiculturalism and develop empathy as they study food deserts.

“Over one in five children in Manitoba experience food insecurity — that’s something they can actually put into perspective and relate to,” she said, citing a statistic from Food Matters Manitoba.

Indigenous people who live on and off-reserve in Manitoba experience disproportionately high rates of food insecurity.

Caronte’s resource explores how discrimination and the legacy of colonialism affect access to nutritious food. By teaching students about high prices in remote grocery stores, how wildfires limit hunting season and other factors that impact meal planning in Manitoba, she said the unit will challenge stereotypes.

The teacher-candidate was awarded an undergraduate research award to develop her pitch between May and August.

The U of M program, a first-of-its-kind initiative on a campus in Canada, pairs early-career researchers with a professor to hone their skills and make an original project over 16 weeks.

Caronte received $7,000 to create interdisciplinary lessons and help her mentor, Sarah Elvins, input data at the history professor’s lab.

(The resource is available on teacherspayteachers.com for just under a dollar to cover the website’s hosting fees, but she said she wants to find a way to distribute the material for free.)

“What’s really neat is Emma is showing that looking at food history can help students learn about a whole host of different issues like media literacy, like decolonization,” said Elvins, who teaches courses that cover food history, domestic labour and popular culture at U of M.

Food history has long been perceived as “fluffy” and unimportant compared to political leaders and other historical records, but it’s a growing area in academia, the professor said.

Elvins said her undergraduate summer student’s project is particularly timely given social media is flooded with influencers and brands that make food-related content.

It is a “demystifying unit” that encourages students to consider bias and question why a TikTok creator encourages them to eat more protein, she said.

Prior to enrolling in an after-degree education program, Caronte was studying history at U of M.

The education student said she wanted to combine her academic interest and appreciation for the elaborate spreads at her family gatherings.

“I love to bake and I love to cook and my dad’s side of the family is Italian so, of course, we really value food,” she said.

“My nonno used to be a chef and a pastry chef so I’ve learned a lot from him. He’s passed down a lot of his recipes.”

Recipes play a key role in her new unit. Students are taught to use them as primary and secondary sources that reveal what kinds of ingredients were popular at any given time, as well as the owner’s daily routines and their economic status.

Other hands-on assignments require students to find and redesign a misleading food advertisement and draw plates that align with every iteration of Canada’s food guide.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca