Seeds of Middle Eastern Culture Teaching Resources
Our Model
Our tested, transferable model has five parts:
- Build long-term trust with a youth-serving partner
- Use culturally relevant plants and foods as the curriculum anchor
- Combine cooking, tasting, gardening, storytelling, and reflection
- Develop youth intercultural awareness and appreciation for new foods
- Assess outcomes through youth-friendly surveys, reflections, and observation
Through these five parts, we aimed to develop progress on the following three learning objective pillars:
- Open-mindedness & Cultural Awareness
- Academic Skills, Plant Science & Literacy
- Food Systems Citizenship and Wellbeing.
Learning Objective 1: Open-Mindedness and Cultural Awareness
Food is one of the fastest ways to meet a culture, and one of the fastest ways to dismiss one. This pillar develops the willingness to encounter unfamiliar foods, ingredients, and practices without ranking them — and the capacity to recognize that every plate carries social, religious, historical, and family meaning that isn't visible at first glance. We use the "Menu Invisibles" framework to make those hidden layers explicit: what appears on the plate is the visible layer; geography, climate, migration, religion, labor, memory, and values are the invisible ones.
Critically, this pillar treats food neophobia — reluctance to try new foods — as an expected, nameable, workable obstacle rather than a shortcoming. Year One taught us that addressing it directly is a necessary part of the educational process, not a side issue.
What it looks like in practice:
Tasting and ingredient-identification games ("What is That?", The Spice Game); sharing family food memories alongside Middle Eastern traditions; connecting Levantine, Egyptian, Iranian, and Turkish foodways to the West African, African American, Filipino, and religious food traditions students bring into the room; learning to ask respectful questions about someone's dietary needs or fasting practices.
How we assess progress:
- How do participants describe the social and cultural factors influencing food choices?
- Do participants report a change in their openness to new foods in reflections and discussions?
- How do participants describe the influence of culture on professional interactions with others?
- What manifestations of cultural perspective-taking and culturally relevant practice do participants demonstrate in their learning, doing, and teaching of foodways?
- Do participants acknowledge the cultural background of their target consumers when they design a menu or demonstrate a food preparation?
- Can participants ask respectful questions about dietary needs, and can they respond to stereotypes?
Sources of evidence:
This can include retrospective post-then-pre survey items on openness and confidence, written reflections, staff observation during tasting activities, and menu-design assignments.
What growth might sound like:
"I think culture is a blessing meant to be shared with everyone"
- All THAT student, Year One
Learning Objective 2: Academic Skills, Plant Science Principles, & Literacy
This pillar insists that cultural learning and rigorous academic learning are the same activity, not competing ones. A student who understands why farmers plant garlic in the fall has learned plant biology, seasonality, and agricultural reasoning — and has also learned something about why garlic appears in the cuisines it does. Culinary vocabulary, flavor-building logic, plant lifecycles, growing conditions, and the economics of value-added products are all treated as academic content with cultural context, and cultural content with academic substance.
This pillar deliberately maps to standards students are already expected to meet in school — such as AFNR Career Cluster PS.02 (plant science principles for production) and Career Readiness CRP.01 (responsible, contributing citizen and employee) — so the work reinforces rather than competes with their coursework.
What it looks like in practice:
Planting garlic in fall and returning to it; germinating fenugreek from seed and caring for it at home; learning that fenugreek is among the oldest cultivated crops in the world, with importance across North Africa, the Middle East, India, and Ethiopia; building culinary vocabulary through sensory description; tracing how ingredients traveled through trade and migration; identifying what a value-added product is and inventing one.
How we assess progress:
- Do participants convey an accurate and culturally respectful representation of the cultural community they associate with a given ingredient? Can they connect its meaning to their own family or lived experience?
- Using garlic as the worked example: Can they explain why farmers plant garlic in fall (a cold period supports strong bulb formation)? Can they define a value-added product and give an example using garlic — garlic oil, powder, pickled garlic, black garlic? Can they name Middle Eastern dishes that use garlic?
- How many Middle Eastern ingredients or dishes can participants name? (Short-term target: 15 or more.)
- How confident are they identifying ingredients such as garlic or fenugreek, and choosing herbs, spices, and aromatics to build flavor?
Sources of evidence:
This may include ingredient/dish naming counts, confidence-rating survey items, open-response meal-planning tasks, student artwork and artifacts, or observation checklists during hands-on planting and cooking.
Learning Objective 3: Food Systems Citizenship & Wellbeing
Food systems citizenship is the understanding that a food system is not a fixed backdrop — it is made of people, and people can change it. Students learn that they are participants in their local food system with standing to ask questions of it: where did this come from, who grew it, who can afford it, who was it made for, and who was left out.
The wellbeing dimension names what all of this is ultimately for. Nutrition, health, and personal and community flourishing are not a separate module bolted onto cultural learning — they are inseparable from it. What nourishes a person is shaped by what their body needs, what their culture recognizes as food, what their community can access, and what their values permit. This is why the project's working definition of food access has four barriers, not three: food must be fresh, nutritious, affordable, and culturally familiar. A system that delivers calories while failing the fourth condition has not delivered wellbeing.
This is also where the project's "food is medicine" thread lives — the health and healing traditions attached to specific plants across Middle Eastern, North African, and West African cultures, and the recognition that values, faith, family, and identity shape food choices as powerfully as price or availability do.
What it looks like in practice:
Discussions of how values shape food choices; tracing rice from West African agriculture through the trans-Atlantic slave trade to displacement by imports today; connecting garden work to entrepreneurship and local food economies; learning who serves on a local food board and how community members influence what appears on nearby shelves; sharing meals as an act of hospitality and community-building rather than only consumption.
How we assess it:
- Do participants offer creative solutions to food-systems issues in class discussions or individual work?
- Do they recognize all four access barriers — fresh, nutritious, affordable, and culturally familiar?
- Can they explain how community members can influence what foods are available locally?
- How confident are they asking where food comes from and how it was produced?
- Do they express the belief that everyone should have access to culturally and religiously appropriate food?
- Can they identify food access barriers in their own community, and do they report participating in local food system activities?
- How do they describe the relationship between what they eat, their health, and their sense of wellbeing?
Sources of evidence:
This could include open-response items on food-systems problem-solving, barrier-identification tasks, self-reported participation in local food activities, reflections on health, values, and food, discussion transcripts and staff observation.
What growth may sound like:
"Value each meal"
- All THAT student, Year One.
A Note on How The Pillars Work Together
The pillars are sequential in emphasis but simultaneous in practice. A single session — planting garlic, smelling fenugreek, eating maqluba together — will usually touch all three: it opens a student to something unfamiliar (Pillar 1), teaches them something demonstrably true about how plants and food work (Pillar 2), and situates them as someone with a stake in and influence over the system that produced it (Pillar 3). Assessment is designed the same way: a short retrospective post-then-pre survey, written reflections, staff observation, and student artifacts, read together rather than pillar by pilla