The Ohio State University Middle East Studies Center

Seeds of Culture: Middle East Culinary Heritage and More

Seeds of Culture: Middle East Culinary Heritage and More

Making Foodways an Entry Point into Culture

Seeds of Middle Eastern Culture helps young people explore Middle Eastern cultures through plants, ingredients, cooking, stories, and shared meals. Through hands-on learning, students discover how food connects to geography, history, family traditions, hospitality, faith, and community. Educators receive practical activities and discussion tools that help students move beyond simply trying a new food to understanding the people, places, and relationships behind it.

A framework for deeper foodways learning

The program is grounded in Menu Invisibles, a learning framework that helps students look beneath what is visible on the plate and investigate the cultural, ecological, historical, and social contexts that make a meal meaningful. This approach to curriculum is for educators who want students to go beyond tasting “new foods” or celebrating cultural diversity at the surface level. It helps students investigate the cultural, historical, geographic, ecological, and social contexts that shape what people grow, cook, serve, and value at mealtime.

The framework follows a simple progression:

  1. Visible — What is on the plate? What do students see, smell, taste, touch, and prepare?
  2. Invisible — What histories, values, environments, technologies, labor, and relationships made this food possible?
  3. Pattern recognition — What can students begin to understand about cultural practices, food systems, and ways of belonging?

Why it matters

Food is familiar, but its meaning is rarely obvious. A dish can carry stories of migration, trade, faith, agriculture, hospitality, adaptation, family memory, and survival. When students learn to ask what is invisible on the menu, culture becomes something lived, practiced, and connected — not a static trait or a stereotype.

This approach helps educators avoid one-off “culture day” activities that expose students to difference without building deeper understanding. Instead, students practice looking beneath the surface, connecting new learning to their own repertoires of family, community, and cultural experience while also learning from the repertoires of others.

What Students Do

  • Explore Middle Eastern herbs, crops, ingredients, and dishes
  • Cook, taste, plant, observe, and share food memories
  • Meet growers, cooks, cultural practitioners, or community guests
  • Investigate how climate, trade, migration, labor, and faith influence food
  • Reflect on connections between Middle Eastern foodways and their own family or community traditions
  • Practice respectful curiosity and cultural learning

What students learn to notice

Menu Invisibles can be used with any plant, ingredient, recipe, meal, or food memory. Educators can guide students to investigate layers such as:

  • Geography and climate: Where does this food grow, and what conditions does it need?
  • History and movement: How did this ingredient, dish, or technique travel?
  • Labor and technology: Who grows, processes, transports, cooks, sells, or serves it?
  • Faith and values: What meanings, rituals, celebrations, or hospitality practices are connected to it?
  • Identity and belonging: How does this food help people remember, gather, adapt, or express who they are?
  • Access and food systems: Who has access to this food, and what systems shape that access?

How educators can use it

Start with a concrete experience: tasting an ingredient, preparing a dish, planting a crop, hearing a guest story, visiting a market, or sharing a meal. Then use prompts that move students from observation to interpretation.

Sample prompts:

  • What do you notice first?
  • What does this food remind you of?
  • What might be invisible behind this ingredient, dish, or meal?
  • What people, places, skills, tools, or histories made it possible?
  • How is it similar to or different from foods you know?
  • What does it teach us about culture, community, or food systems?

From appreciation to practice

The goal is not only food appreciation. It is cultural fluency through practice. Students learn that chefs, growers, home cooks, families, and communities all hold foodways knowledge. As students taste, cook, plant, ask questions, compare traditions, and reflect, they build a broader repertoire for participating respectfully in diverse cultural and culinary settings.

Menu Invisibles helps students become more curious eaters, more careful observers, more respectful cultural learners, and more thoughtful food systems citizens.

How To Use This Teaching Approach

Tangible Learning Experiences Connected to Students' Identities

Start with the students' experiences and create new memorable experiences tied to one or more of our three core learning pillars: 1) Open-mindedness & Cultural Awareness; 2) Academic Skills, Plant Science & Literacy; 3) Food Systems Citizenship and Wellbeing. Include history and geography as connections to cultural context of the foodway. Go beyond standard curriculum. Take liberties. Include literature, media, creative hands-on activities. Connect to the kids' lived experience and identies, and the local culture as much as possible. Making the cultural context of culinary skills and knowledge, their historical background, the circumstances in which they developed, and their geographical origins can be an entry point into cultural understanding and a means for developing intercultural awareness. The term “foodways” is a useful shorthand for the practices surrounding sourcing, preparing and serving food within a particular cultural context. For example, our Seeds of Middle Eastern Culture program makes Middle Eastern foodways into various means for youth in a culinary program to learn about the histories, daily life realities, beliefs and norms of a number of Middle Eastern countries, contexts and communities. Another goal of the program is to make the French background of many culinary skills, practices and literacies taught in culinary training explicit and to validate multiple, culturally diverse ways of “knowing how to cook.” Students go from recognizing cultural differences based on superficial culture (see iceberg model of culture), to understanding the tangible aspects of food, or any type of material culture are the final products of deeper “invisibles.” 

Reiterate Shared Values, Challenge, and Motivate

Name the values and demonstrate the All THAT values of integrity, respect, responsibility, character-building, relationships, and celebration. Emphasize the importance of caring for food sources, understanding the ways culture shapes and sustains food preparation, and recognizing the people involved in our food systems. Use a rubric and be explicit about what you are looking for from students: how they model these values, grow in their skills and abilities, and form and maintain relationships with others. Give feedback consistently, according to clear criteria and rubrics, and do so with equanimity. Prioritize formative feedback over summative feedback. Challenge students to apply their learning on their own: grow the plant in their own garden, cook the recipe in their own kitchen, make a friend from another culture, or teach a friend how to cook a food from their own or another culture and explain what it teaches about the culture it comes from. Follow up with them. Ask what happened. Listen and take an interest in their uniqueness. Review where we’ve been together, what we’re doing now, what’s coming next, and why.

Use Prompts for Dialogue and Self Reflection That Deepen the Learning

Use prompts to help students move from hands-on experience to deeper meaning. Ask questions that guide them to notice sensory details, connect foods to family or cultural memories, compare traditions respectfully, and consider the people, places, and systems behind each meal. Prompts should deepen dialogue, not feel like a quiz. Start with an open-ended question that relates to their experience. For example, "Why be Vegan?" Then make connections to fasting practices amongst the different religious groups in the Middle East, and segue to feasts and the different types of foods people eat for special occasions. Ask them to write down one thing they value about mealtime at home. Ask them about a memory from younger years related to a familiar plant, such as garlic, then grow the garlic together. Connect to plants, history, society, family, culture, values and beliefs across cultureal differences, and many other topics that allow them to reflect on themselves as cultureal beings while considering other cultural worldviews. Make dialogue and self-reflection central and related to the relationship-building activities of mealtime conversation, family night with their parents and caretakers, and learning from guest speakers and facilitators.

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