This week in the classroom we read Tomie dePaola’s The Popcorn Book and explored the ideas of Indigenous foodways and Indigenous wisdom. We learned that Native peoples are known for their stewardship of the natural world, for the invention of the Three Sisters planting technique, that oral tradition and storytelling is an important part of Indigenous culture, and that the Indigenous people of what is now called San Francisco are the Ohlone. From the book, we learned that popcorn used to be worn as jewelry and that archaeologists found popcorn kernels that were 5,600 years old in a bat cave in New Mexico!
In the kitchen, we enjoyed two recipes celebrating humans’ long relationship with corn. We made rainbow popcorn from scratch on the stove and ground by hand an accompanying spice blend using a mortar and pestle, an ancient food preparation tool that has many useful modern-day applications in the kitchen today. The kindergarten chefs finished off a recipe of Peruvian chicha morada, a drink made with purple corn, by adding fresh lime juice and cut up pineapple and apples for a truly delicious corn feast.
