Foodways are the practices and cultural traditions related to sourcing, preparing, and creating food for the purpose of mealtime, situated within a culture or a confluence of cultures. We emphasize food sources, the ways in which culture shapes food and vice versa, and the people involved in our food systems. Seeds of Middle Eastern Culture makes foodways an entry point into culture by focusing on Middle Eastern culinary practices and raising awareness about the plants that hold unique meaning in the region. While the foodways practices are translated into culinary skills, their cultural background can remain obscured or can become taken-for-granted. As students become aware of culture, they connect to their own cultural backgrounds. This is a key part of developing intercultural awareness and a sense of pride in one's own unique cultural affiliation or combination of affiliations.

Sourcing the highest quality, most culturally relevant ingredients often requires knowledge of farming and gardening. Yet agricultural knowledge, a key to addressing food insecurity, is becoming less and less widespread, especially with regard to traditional knowledge.  As of the 2022 Census of Agriculture, the average age of a farmer in the U.S. is 58 years. Seeds of Middle Eastern Culture aims to inspire young people to garden as part of their foodways repertoire through hands-on experiences and to demonstrate that illustrate how people play critical roles in food systems at a local scale. Our program connects young people directly to farming and food business activities. 

A core value of the program is food sovereignty and the right of individuals and communities to create and sustain nutritious and culturally suitable food sources, and to shape their own food and agricultural systems. We believe local communities can and should play a central role in food production and policy-making that address food insecurity while ensuring the availability of culturally significant produce and ingredients.

Relationship building is a collaborative, iterative, embodied, and values-based process. In the case of SEMC food, conversation, cultural respect, and ongoing shared work were tangible focal points that gave the activities a shared purpose, another key to forming a vibrant relationship. Ti build this kind of relationship it’s most important, not to draft a strategic plan, but to start showing up, engaging with the teachers, students and administrators of the program. Get to know how they do things by participating in them. Attend any meetings or public facing events, offer an activity to support their learning objectives and program objectives, and be ready to keep delivering if the activities are successful. The process depends on consistently showing up, conversations with the teens and their families, and responding to what partners and participants care about.

Curriculum is co-created around community needs and focuses on the tangible and experiential. The SEMC curriculum developed from community input, including farmers, foodways educators, nutrition experts, culinary professionals, and Middle East studies specialists and made All THAT curriculum and program goals top priorities. Learning from multiple perspectives is key to creating rigorous, relevant, and effective interdisciplinary curriculum.

Pedagogy is culturally responsive and sensitive to student needs. Activities are adapted in real time to the students’ interests, prior knowledge, cultural backgrounds, and life circumstances. Relationship-building happens through planting, cooking, tasting, eating together, storytelling, family memories, guest demonstrations, and site visits. Learning happens when the students feel accepted and a sense of belonging because it gives them the freedom to speak their mind, try new experiences, and learn from each other.

Activities are designed for mutual benefit. SEMC supports All THAT’s goals around academic achievement, life skills, career planning, and culinary pathways, while All THAT provides a context where SEMC’s foodways curriculum becomes meaningful and impactful. Each activity grows the program, expanding to include families, diaspora communities, farmers, chefs, educators, and local food-system actors into a wider network.

Plants, ingredients and meals provide tangible and accessible entry points for students to explore a culture that may be unfamiliar to them. By anchoring the curriculum in plants grown, ingredients used, and foods prepared across the Middle East, students encounter culture through experiences they can see, touch, grow, taste, create, and share with others. These experiences provide a foundation for exploring the broader cultural, geographic, historical, and culinary contexts connected to the food while building relationships.

For a Middle Eastern context, crops such as thyme, garlic, onion, cucumber, mint, and others were selected for their widespread use across Middle Eastern foodways. Students can explore these crops further using our culturally relevant crop pages, which provide more in-depth information about the history, growing conditions, and symbolic, religious, medicinal, and culinary significance and uses of each plant. The pages also include recipes that students can try at home, extending the learning beyond the classroom and connecting the crops they learned about to foods they can prepare and eat.

This plant-based approach also helps students notice what might be called the “plate invisibles”: the histories, relationships, labor, ecological conditions, trade routes, memories, values, and identities that are present in a meal but not immediately visible on the plate. A dish is never only a dish. It carries stories about who grew the ingredients, how seeds traveled, why certain foods became meaningful, how families adapted recipes across generations, and how communities express welcome, celebration, faith, care, and belonging through food.

Making these “plate invisibles” visible turns a familiar activity—eating—into a deeper form of cultural learning. Students begin with concrete sensory experiences: smelling mint, planting garlic, tasting thyme, preparing cucumbers, or sharing a meal. From there, educators can guide questions that connect the visible food to its invisible context:

• Where does this plant grow, and what does it need in order to thrive?
• Who has grown, harvested, cooked, sold, or served this ingredient?
• What family memories, religious meanings, healing practices, or hospitality traditions are connected to it?
• How has this food changed as people migrated, adapted, traded, or built new communities?
• What does this ingredient reveal about climate, agriculture, labor, access, identity, and belonging?

In this way, plants, ingredients, and meals become more than examples of Middle Eastern cuisine. They become entry points into systems thinking. Students can see how agriculture, culture, history, migration, health, economics, and community life meet in everyday food choices. This helps them understand food not only as something to consume, but as something that connects people to land, heritage, livelihood, and one another.

SEMC combines cooking, tasting, gardening, storytelling, and reflection so students learn foodways through lived experience rather than abstract information. Each session gives students something concrete to do: taste an unfamiliar ingredient, cook a dish together, plant a crop, listen to a guest’s story, compare the experience with their own family food memories, and reflect on what the food reveals about culture, history, agriculture, migration, and belonging.

We began with sensory entry points. In the “What is That?” game, students tasted and identified foods connected to Middle Eastern and West African foodways, building culinary vocabulary while talking about how ingredients travel, transform, and become meaningful in different communities. The activity made unfamiliar foods less intimidating because students could begin with curiosity: What does this smell like? What does it taste like? Have I eaten something like this before? Where might this ingredient come from?

Cooking sessions then turned those ingredients into shared meals. Students cooked vegetarian bamya and used okra as a bridge across regions. In Middle Eastern foodways, okra appears in dishes such as bamya stew, often connected to home cooking, hospitality, and regional variation across the Levant, Egypt, and beyond. Later, students encountered okra again through West African cooking, including Nigerian okra stew. Seeing the same plant appear in multiple culinary traditions helped students understand that ingredients do not belong to only one place. They move through trade, migration, agriculture, diaspora, and family adaptation.

West Africa became especially important as a bridge between the local community culture of many All THAT students and the Middle Eastern cultures SEMC was introducing. All THAT serves a diverse student body in which Black and African American students are a major part of the community. By including West African foodways, the curriculum connected Middle Eastern learning to cultural lineages that connect to local and family heritage for many students and families. West African rice agriculture, Nigerian food traditions, and dishes such as Jollof rice opened conversations about African diasporic history, Black food culture, local African American community knowledge, and the movement of crops and cooking practices through the trans-Atlantic slave trade and modern migration. This made cultural comparison relational rather than distant: students could explore Middle Eastern foodways while also recognizing the African and African American food knowledge.

Several activities made this bridge visible. At the African and African American Extension Center in the Bronzeville/King-Lincoln neighborhood, students cooked bamya, ate Persian food from Charmy’s, smelled and touched saffron, and experienced the Bronzeville Farmers Market happening nearby. At International Gratitude Night, families shared an international meal that included Nigerian food with okra stew, Turkish food, and Levantine mojaddara. In the West African foodways session, Dr. Jacien Carr discussed the global history of rice and West African rice agriculture, and Dr. Joanne Mapis of Fork in Nigeria shared Jollof rice. Students connected the meal to regional identity, agriculture, and the role of shared food in cultural learning; several students later said they wanted to try cooking Jollof rice themselves.

Gardening added another layer by connecting meals to soil, time, and care. With Jodi Spencer of Vincent Walters Urban Farm, students planted garlic in All THAT’s garden and discussed garlic in family traditions, Middle Eastern cuisines, medicinal uses, and value-added products such as garlic oil, garlic powder, pickled garlic, and black garlic. The lesson made seasonality tangible: plant now, tend over time, harvest later. The fenugreek activity extended this approach. Students handled fenugreek as a full-grown plant, dried herb, and seed; smelled it; planted their own seeds; and learned about its importance in North Africa, the Middle East, India, and Ethiopia. The follow-up art activity, inspired by Columbus artist Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, used seeds and natural materials to connect plant science, storytelling, Black cultural memory, and community history.

Storytelling and reflection tied the sensory work to meaning. In the Egyptian foodways session, students compared ancient Egyptian feast foods shown on tomb walls with contemporary foods such as koshary and vegan fasting foods. In Amany’s storytelling session, students learned about Egyptian culture and Ramadan through videos and personal stories, then shared their own cultural backgrounds and family experiences. In the spice activity, students smelled, tasted, and discussed spices, made mint lemonade, learned from Baladna about Palestinian culture, and shared a meal of maqluba. These activities showed that food is not only something to identify or prepare; it is a way people remember, celebrate, worship, welcome guests, express identity, and build community.

This combined method works because it moves from the concrete to the complex. Students begin with touch, smell, taste, soil, and shared meals. From there, they can ask deeper questions: Who grows this food? How did it travel? What histories does it carry? Why does it matter to a family, a faith community, a region, or a diaspora? How does it connect to food access, health, agriculture, entrepreneurship, and belonging in Columbus? In this way, cooking, tasting, gardening, storytelling, and reflection become one integrated pedagogy for helping students see themselves as cultural learners, cultural ambassadors, and participants in local agri-cultural food systems.

SEMC develops youth intercultural awareness by reflecting on memories of our parents and other people who influenced us, especially connection to certain plants, mealtimes, and ingredients we use in our kitchens. We call these “Seed Stories,” and we use them to identify values we learned from our family and friends. Then we experience growing the plants, preparing the foods, and eating meals with special significance in Middle Eastern and West African cultures together. Talking about values connects the learning to “self as cultural being (Gay, 2010, p. 3),” and the hands-on activities serve as entry points into other cultural worldviews. The sensory experiences in the presence of caring adults and other kids also trying out new things, make unfamiliar foods approachable and give students concrete ways to ask questions.

The central purpose of each learning activity is to increase openmindedness, an important dimension of intercultural awareness. Specifically, the goal is to move students from food neophobia toward curiosity. Activities such as the “What is That?” game, the Spice Game, cooking bamya, tasting saffron, drinking mint lemonade, planting garlic and fenugreek, and sharing meals of Jollof rice, maqluba, mojaddara, Turkish breakfast, and other foods give students repeated chances to encounter new ingredients in a safe, relational setting. Because these foods are introduced through games, stories, shared meals, and trusted adults, students can try something unfamiliar without feeling judged or pressured.

The curriculum also builds appreciation by connecting new foods to students’ own cultural backgrounds. Middle Eastern foodways are placed in conversation with West African, African American, Filipino, religious, family, and local Columbus food traditions. For example, okra becomes a bridge between Middle Eastern bamya and West African okra stew; garlic becomes a bridge between plant science, family cooking memories, medicine, entrepreneurship, and global cuisines; and fasting and feasting traditions open conversations about religion, hospitality, and celebration and how they shape our menus. This comparative approach helps students recognize that all cultures have meaningful foodways, including their own.

Reflection and dialogue are essential to the overall learning. Students share dinner-table memories, family recipes, religious practices, hospitality norms, and cultural values. They discuss how values shape food choices and how professional interactions in culinary and hospitality settings require cultural respect. Evidence from student reflections

“My thoughts are shaped by what we talk about around the dinner table.”

“The tradition I am continuing is sitting around the dinner table as a family… my Mom gives me advice on life and other things.”

“My Mom’s homemade Adobo . . . brings peace and love to the table.”

“I have friends… that I don’t eat in front of because [they are fasting because of their religion and] it’s rude.”

“I think culture is a blessing meant to be shared with everyone.”

“The foodways that connect me to my culture are African foods and Black culture food. I also eat every other cultures’ food or just taste it.”

“Value each meal.”

In this way, students practice perspective-taking: they consider dietary needs, recognize cultural and religious food practices, identify stereotypes, and deepen their understanding of the ways that food preferences are shaped by family, identity, access, history, and community.

Guest speakers, cultural organizations, farmers, chefs, educators, and food business owners also serve as cultural ambassadors for students. When students hear directly from people connected to Palestinian, Egyptian, Iranian, Turkish, Nigerian, West African, African American, and other food traditions, culture becomes personal rather than distant. These encounters show students that food knowledge lives in people, families, farms, restaurants, faith communities, and neighborhoods.

Ultimately, SEMC develops appreciation for new foods by developing appreciation for people. Students learn that trying new foods is not only about expanding taste preferences. It is also about practicing openness, humility, respect, and curiosity. As they build culinary vocabulary, plant knowledge, food systems awareness, and confidence with unfamiliar ingredients, they also begin to see themselves as cultural learners, cultural ambassadors, and future contributors to more inclusive local food systems.