Food for Thought

Detention Recipes

In our podcast - Reframeables - my sister and I end up talking a lot about food. In fact, a whole component of our podcast’s newsletter is recipes…most of them written by me (and in the process of being compiled into an e-book)! Long before Reframeables was even the glimmer of an idea I was already writing about food. Recipe writing has informed my praxis as an educator from the get-go, before I even understood what that word meant.

The first time I used recipe writing in my English class was when I was teaching in a prison. For my students, young offenders awaiting trial or sentencing, time spent reading and writing for grades was not high on their priority lists. The systemic issues that land youth in prison are known quantities in educational discourse, but not much has been written concerning the education these young people receive while they bide their time in detention. Sitting in my classroom all those years ago, I remember wondering what value could be gleaned from the time those students and I spent together in what was essentially educational purgatory? 

In a desperate attempt to engage one young man who couldn’t read or write but loved to talk about his Italian heritage, I took a stab in the dark and asked him about cooking. Maybe he could bring some order to his manic talking and share with me the story of a family recipe? I cajoled him into it, convincing him that I would write the recipe down on paper but they had to be his words. How hard he worked to guide me through, painstakingly working to recall his grandmother’s tomato sauce recipe! We finished our exercise and then a guard arrived to take him to court. I never saw him again. The scrap of paper on which his recipe was scribbled archived a fragment of who that young man was beyond his charges. He was someone’s grandson. 

At the start of every new semester, I find myself returning to a memory of that momentary connection. Relational teaching hinges on connections made between student and teacher to open up space for learning. I look to food writing to help that process along. What better place to meet each other than the table? To build classroom community and connect with students of all ages, I start things off by sharing one of my own recipes (most recently my MEd students were surprised by this choice). Each semester it’s something new: muffins maybe, or a soup. What is important is that it’s always connected back to a story, be it about my mother or, in recent years, my young son. I used to model writing out the ingredients and steps on the blackboard, though these days it’s built into a discussion board on Moodle. These recipes make our classroom into a test kitchen, providing food for thought. 

Through the recipes my students have shared with me I have learned about grandmothers through enchilada recipes and aunties via detailed notes on how to water Jamaican rum cake. I have found peripheral references made to countries of origin and familial traditions annotated in the margins of ingredient lists. And buried in the step-by-step instructions I see the shadow of a child watching and learning in one of their earliest classrooms: their childhood kitchen. The relationships formed in our learning as we pass the metaphorial plates set the table for a semester-long meal. A feast of shared words.

I have searched for ways to apply this learning beyond the classroom and I think the success of our Reframeables’ recipes points to something. Hannah Arendt uses the metaphor of the table to expound on how a societal commons must operate without collapsing in on itself. We need the table to bring us together to create enough space to sit at and see the other who sits down across from us. I want to extend that metaphor and suggest that what we put on the table matters just as much as meeting there in the first place. What we read, the words we share: food for thought.