Sensory learning tools to re-awaken kids’ curiosity and connection to real food

Food writer Bee Wilson has been in classrooms across the UK, and what she’s discovered is startling: many children have completely lost their sensory connection to real food.

They know the peach emoji but not the fuzzy feel of actual peach skin.

They recognize mint from shampoo but have never smelled a fresh mint leaf.

When asked where food comes from, kids used to say “the supermarket.” Now they say “mommy’s iPad.”

This slow shift is revealing a new gap in child development that affects how kids observe, describe, and engage with the world around them.

In this article + podcast episode, Bee explains what’s lost when children grow up disconnected from real food. And, she explains what can happen when you put fresh produce in their hands and simply ask: What do you see?

Bee shares how these lessons build scientific observation skills, spark rich oral language, and get even the most reluctant writers eager to put words on paper. Kids speak in vivid similes and metaphors. They notice details they’ve never noticed before. And, teachers report some of the most meaningful classroom experiences of their careers.

Bee is author of multiple books, including First Bite: How We Learn to Eat. She’s also the co-founder of TastEd, a charity offering free sensory food education resources now used in over 1,800 UK schools. She’s a fascinating guest sharing practical ways any teacher can bring this into their classroom, including a simple lesson you could try tomorrow.

What happens when kids lose their sensory connection to food

ANGELA: So Bee, you described modern eating as happening in a state of what you call profound sensory disengagement. What does that actually look like in everyday life?

BEE: So, head teacher Jason O’Rourke, with whom I co-founded the charity TastEd, will sometimes say that when he asks kids where food comes from, they used to say it comes from Tesco, which is a big UK supermarket equivalent to Walmart. And now they say it comes from mummy’s iPad.

And I think, whatever our age, adult or child, so much of what we eat is hidden from us at the point of purchase. We’re buying it under plastic. We’re maybe ordering it online. It’s coated in packaging of one kind or another. It’s often very denatured from its basic raw ingredient state. So it’s a kind of sensory deprivation.

And considering that eating is the most sensory activity, if you compare and contrast with our grandparents’ generation, where you might be either growing the vegetables yourselves or going to buy them at an open-air market where you can see the colours, the textures, the shapes, very few of us have the luxury of eating like that anymore. And it’s children simply not having that direct sensory contact with food as something normal and everyday in their lives.

How food disconnection shows up in the classroom

How is this showing up for children in ways that educators might not be aware of, especially since we don’t often get to have mealtime with students at school? They might not even be aware of the things that you’re saying. How is it looking at school?

I think how it’s looking at school or at home or in any part of a child’s life is there would be a basic level of what I would call food literacy that we might expect kids to have, which through my work with TastEd, I’ve found time and again, you can’t assume that a child of ten has ever experienced a raw tomato or a carrot, that they’ve ever bitten into a fresh apple before.

So when you’re thinking about how this shows up for educators, it’s hard even to quantify how that would show up. I’m wondering with little kids, there’s obviously so many stories involving fresh fruits and vegetables, and that would go some way to addressing this. But then, a child that hasn’t ever known a turnip and they’re reading that story about the enormous turnip, it must feel different, mustn’t it, whether you’ve eaten it or not, whether you know it or not.

And equally, I think what I wish is that there was more space for educators, both in the US, UK, and all around the world, to use food in the classrooms. Because what teachers have told us at TastEd over and over again is that one person said a really beautiful thing. They said, “It’s the first time I feel I’ve really got to know the children in my own class”, that the food enabled these really deep, beautiful conversations between the children as well as children to teacher.

So I think we’re all missing out on a lot by not having this direct knowledge of food.

Why food literacy matters for child development

I agree with you as a person who is very intuitive, as a person who really likes to be part of the natural world. How do you describe the importance of this to someone who maybe doesn’t get that? Who’s just like, okay, so they order food online, and they’ve never had a real peach. You tell a story about a boy who says he never had a peach. He can recognize a peach emoji. He’s had peach-flavored medicine, but never an actual peach. What’s lost there?

I mean, a huge amount is lost. You’re right. Some people don’t get it. I remember at an early stage when we were trying to explain it to someone, and they’re like, “Okay, well, they don’t eat broccoli. They probably eat cauliflower.” And I’m like, “No, they don’t eat any vegetables.” They don’t know any of this.

I mean, even if all you care about is, let’s say, economics, then the economic cost of having populations that don’t consume enough fruits and vegetables results in more hospital admissions, more diet-related ill health.

I don’t really want to reduce it to those terms because I think what it brings to a child’s life, being introduced to vegetables and fruits as something that is joyous. I don’t want to just quantify it by saying it’s going to make their bodies healthier because it’s going to do so much else for them. It’s going to introduce them to the joy of all those different colors, shapes, textures, and flavors. And it’s a world of different cultures.

We have these amazing conversations in the classroom, or other teachers do, with kids with TastEd, where you bring in some sprigs of mint leaves, for example, and say, “What does this remind you of?” And every kid in the class will have a different mint memory. And really, what they’re doing is asking their peers and the teacher to share in a little piece of their home. They might say, “This smells like the tea that my grandmother makes”.

And you realise that might be a child from a Moroccan or Turkish background who’s growing up with mint tea as something normal. Another child might just say chewing gum, but also that’s part of their everyday life. Quite often, you have kids saying the mint smells like my dad’s shower gel. And you realize that, again, it’s the sensory disconnect. We know these ingredients, but we know them at one remove.

So to explain what they’re missing, it’s a kind of basic, to me, this food literacy I talk about should be a universal human entitlement. There’s something that gets talked about a lot, which most people generally accept, which is the right to food. Every child in the world has a right to food. Not to say that every child in the world is fed and that there isn’t hunger, but I think we can all accept that child hunger is a terrible thing and shouldn’t exist, right?

But if there is a right to food, there also should be a right to know the foods that will enable you to grow up healthy. And therefore, you have to build up this repertoire, and you have to know what a carrot is like before you reject it.

You don’t have to enjoy every single food in the world. I certainly don’t. But I know that I’ve had the privilege of the opportunity to find out what I think about strawberries and cherries and blueberries and bananas and apples and lettuce and different colours of purple carrots, orange carrots.

If you’re a kid who’s never tried, a cherry, for example, we’ve met children who didn’t know that cherries had stones in the middle. They didn’t know that plums have stones in the middle. The pits, exactly. Again, that’s just basic practical knowledge that they’re missing out on in so many different ways.

How sensory food lessons build language and observation skills

Yeah, you know, I love the example that you gave about the mint, because to me, I can envision all of the rich conversations that came from that. So this is not just like one more thing that teachers have to do that parents should be doing that teachers aren’t doing, which is a whole line of rhetoric that I don’t find particularly helpful. It’s more like when you introduce these things in the classroom, you are actually enhancing kids’ ability to observe, to notice, to experiment, to try different things. They’re enhancing their vocabulary. Like I can see some big ties really to science and observation skills, as well as language arts, and describing things.

Talk to us about TastEd, this curriculum, the free resources for teachers, as well as families. How’s it being used in schools? How is it fitting into the school day? And what are you seeing with it?

Yeah, so it’s a series of resources. So I co-founded TastEd in 2019, and the team has now grown, and I created more than one hundred free learning resources consisting of lesson plans, PowerPoints. They’re designed to be so easy that they’re almost like a recipe that you could have a supply teacher turn up and use them, just blind, never having gone through the training.

Ideally, there’s also free training videos that schools can access. And ideally, we want people to watch those just to get a hang of a few basic principles.

But when you talk about TastEd enhancing vocabulary, that’s music to my ears. That’s the part of it that probably excites me almost as much as the thought that this is something that can change a child’s preference. It just switches them on to writing.

And especially the children in the class who have labelled themselves as not very good at literacy, as maybe not good at writing, maybe they feel their handwriting is poor. It doesn’t matter because as soon as you place fresh fruit and vegetables in their hands and say, what do you see? What do you smell? What do you touch? What do you eventually taste? What do you hear? The language just pours out of them.

They speak in these incredibly rich similes and metaphors. So we’ll have them say that a tomato looks like anything from a globe to a planet. You cut it open, and it looks like a brain, or it looks like a tree, or it looks like someone’s face, or it looks like the letter G. And as soon as one person sees it, everyone else sees it too. So there’s this wonderful shared sense of almost communion around it.

And as you know, as other educators know, speaking is the first step to confident writing. And by the time they’ve spoken all of these incredible similes, all the teacher then has to do is say, “Well, remember that thing that you said about the cucumber or the tomato or the broccoli? Write that down.” And they’re so anxious to capture it.

Teachers have reported again and again that these less confident writers in the class will write in a TastEd lesson because the desire is there to express themselves. And I think that is core to so many other subjects. As you said, it lends itself extraordinarily well to science.

We did create, in conjunction with a young science teacher, a series of five plant science lessons for TastEd, which are some of my favorite ones, where you use root vegetables to develop the concept of what roots are for in plants in general. There’s one on fruits and flowers, and the role of fruits and flowers within all plants, but then linking it to tomatoes as a form of fruit.

So yeah, you can do it kind of directly as a science lesson, but I think you’re right that they’re also transferable skills, that kind of close observation. We’ve recently created a set of three lessons on beans and legumes. And the close observation we’ve had from children looking at a dry butter bean, and we had these black and white special beans called yin yang beans, which are very rare, and they look like the yin yang sign.

And children have looked at those beans, and they have said, it looks like a killer whale. It looks like a face. It looks like a doll. It looks like the sand and the sea. And each time, I would be saying it looks like a Dalmatian dog. I would never have thought of that. And then as soon as they’ve said it, everyone in the class can see it.

And I feel that has to be able to transfer to many, many other subjects.

How food curiosity extends beyond the classroom

You know, what else I’m imagining is if you even just did one lesson, like just your lesson that you were describing with the tomato, I can see them going home, and then when they see someone in the kitchen preparing dinner, kind of looking and saying like, Huh, I wonder what’s inside of that onion that big sis is chopping or my dad is chopping or whatever.

I can see for a lot of kids how that would just awaken that curiosity of what actually is going on inside other foods. If all this cool stuff is just inside a tomato, what’s happening with everything else? And it might actually get them in the kitchen. It might get them cooking. It might get them asking more questions about what they’re eating.

Definitely. I love how you put it because you said it might awaken their curiosity. The point is, the curiosity is already there.

Again, Jason, the head teacher who co-founded TastEd, always says you actually have to stop little kids from putting stuff in their mouths. I mean, eating is how they explore the world. That curiosity about food is there, but we kind of somewhat educated out of them, sadly, normally.

Whereas you’re right, once you’ve awakened it in just one or two lessons, we get this feedback anecdotally the whole time that teachers will say that parents have reported, Oh, you did that apple class and kids came home and said, “Can we actually buy a different type of apple? Because I tried these green ones and I really liked them, and they tasted different from the red ones.”

And it absolutely, in a very organic way, filters through into the way the child behaves at home around food.

And for many parents, it’s a big relief because we’re living through a phase we have here in the UK, a cost of living crisis. The cost of groceries is just skyrocketing. And on low-income families, we know it’s a really big risk buying foods that a child doesn’t want to eat because you may throw it away.

And obviously, doing these sessions, it doesn’t sadly reduce the cost of the fruit and vegetables, but what it does do is that you can then say to the parents, well, we are so proud of your child because what they did today is they tried their first, let’s say, green bean or sugar snap pea, snow pea, whatever it might be. And at least that then opens the possibility that the parent thinks, OK, it is worth buying that because it’s not going to be thrown away, and maybe we can enjoy it together.

And I know speaking for myself as a parent, when your kids are little, and they’re going through those picky phases, it can be demoralizing. It can be shattering for parents thinking, Oh, yet another thing I’m cooking getting rejected. And it’s just one little thing. Doesn’t solve it, but it helps.

Why food exploration helps families, too

And planting the seeds of curiosity, you know, and wonder, and training kids to think about food in this more adventurous way. And TastEd has resources for families as well, right?

Yes, there are resources on our website that families can download and do together. And it’s a great way to do it. I mean, the whole idea of TastEd is make learning about food into a game. And all you’re doing is just using your own five senses, which have been the best tools for analysing food since hunter-gatherer times. You have them, your child has them, you just need to kind of wake them up a bit.

And it’s really fun to play these games together, and I think playing those kinds of fun games. Again, as a parent, my youngest one was the one who really struggled with new foods and wanted everything separate. And there were a lot of really unhappy mealtimes where I would just wish he’d try more, and he could probably feel my stress, and then I could feel his stress. So it’s kind of negative feedback loop.

Conversely, you play these games, and it puts you on the same page as the child as a parent. And that’s such a relief for both of you. You can kind of let yourself off the hook as a parent and think, Oh, let’s just have fun. Neither of us has to put this in our mouth. Let’s just see what colours we see together. Explore the world together. It is a way to explore the natural world, as you said, without even stepping outside.

Why sensory learning creates stronger memories

Yeah, exactly. And in a way to awaken kids’ natural curiosity again, to get them experiencing something memorable is another big issue. I feel like in classrooms, we know that kids and humans, we remember things better when there’s an emotion tied to it. Scent is very closely tied to emotion. You know, when you smell things, you’re more likely to remember them. And creating these more emotional experiences that will help kids latch on to the activity can be really challenging. But this idea of just bringing some beans into the classroom and observing them can actually do that. It works. It’s actually that simple.

It works. And as you said earlier, teachers quite understandably have had enough of people saying, in addition to all of the other things you do in your busy day, you need to do this as well.

And what we’ve tried to say from the beginning is, this is a way to deliver the curriculum you have to deliver anyway, and it can enhance it.

And the reward for teachers is so high. I can’t say how many of the teacher feedback things have been saying things like this was some of the most impactful, meaningful experiences that they have had in a classroom since they started their teaching career.

And actually, it’s interesting what you said about memory. The teachers themselves seem to find the sessions very memorable. And I can see why, because it’s actually a privilege being present in a room with someone when they have their first taste of something, whether it’s a fresh herb, their first green vegetable, or their first slice of lemon.

Trying something, being brave, and actually liking it. That’s an absolutely magical, transformative thing. And as you know, so much of teaching is this kind of slow, painstaking, cumulative work, which is extremely rewarding and certainly incredibly important.

But with food, sometimes the transformations are just like that. I mean, I’ve been there with you, you have at the beginning of the class, children saying, “I don’t like this. I’ll never try it”. And then, somehow, by some process of a combination of sometimes their friends influencing them, they see other people try. Curiosity gets the better of them. They just can’t resist trying something.

We have these two golden rules in every TastEd lesson: no one has to try, and no one has to like. And teachers, again, the feedback has been that, by saying this, the children just relax. You see their shoulders go down. They know they won’t be judged. And it creates a really lovely atmosphere in the classroom.

And then nine times out of ten, they do try because they know they’re not going to be judged if they try something, put it in their mouth, and then put it back down again. That’s fine. That’s encouraged. That still counts as trying. But yes, it really bonds children with whatever other learning they’re doing.

How food lessons connect to science, history, and culture

We’ve also done TastEd lessons around history. So there’s one on ancient Rome. There’s a whole series I did on British Tudor history, where we kind of explore the ways in which making salads was very different in Tudor times. And at the end of that, the children get to make something called a grand salad with lots of different ingredients.

As I mentioned, we’ve done these plant science ones. We’ve done one on the food of migrants and refugees. That was about the food of Syrian refugees. We’ve done ones on the Great Fire of London.

But teachers, once you’ve taught a few, you could absolutely adapt it to whatever themes you have in your classroom. Because the idea is simply you bring in any fresh fruit or any fresh vegetable, and you focus on one sense. So you just say to the children, tell me what you see, or touch, or smell, or hear.

The hearing ones are very interesting. And I think it’s something we don’t talk about a lot as adults. And the sight of a class of children taking sticks of celery and just snapping it next to their ear is so much fun. Just listening to that crunch.

And that’s a very safe way to try something because some kids are scared to try. But if you say you don’t have to crunch it in your mouth straight away, just try that. And it’s a way that everyone can join in.

Why kids don’t need junk food to get excited

Yeah, I love this way of bringing in healthy, unprocessed foods, because so often we have food in the classroom. It’s maybe you’re teaching the moon phases with Oreo cookies, or you’re giving M&Ms as a reward. And we’re giving these familiar, sweet, sugary, processed foods. And that’s really our only chance in schools to have interactions with kids around food. And this is so much more satisfying.

It’s so much more satisfying. And the big thing we’ve discovered is the excitement is there in the food itself.

So this has surprised me. I mean, that first year when we were piloting and trialing TastEd in as many schools as we could, and we were doing it in Jason’s school, which is in Lincolnshire in the UK, and then a couple of schools in Cambridge, where I live, and I was learning so much from teachers.

And the main teacher I was trialing it with, who teaches, actually, this would count as pre-K, this was age four to five. So that’s kind of what we call reception year or early years. But that’s before someone’s even starting at school, isn’t it, in the States. But I remember this teacher and I were just so startled by the extent to which we didn’t have to kind of jazz up the vegetables or turn them into a smiley face on a plate or pretend they were something other than they were or hide the vegetables by baking them into a cookie or a brownie.

If they’re presented in the right way and you talk to the kids like they’re human beings, which they are, the excitement of the fresh produce itself is so great.

I remember her sometimes saying, again, I’m using examples of tomatoes, but let me switch. I’ll talk about peppers because peppers are also very exciting. We’d bring these sweet bell peppers into the classroom. And first of all, you just look at the shapes. You know, if you have those long Romano ones, I remember one of the kids just saying it was like a space rocket. And we all looked, and suddenly it was a very dynamic space rocket.

And you look at a bell pepper, and you simply ask the kids, “Why do you think it’s called a bell pepper?” You think of the shape of a bell. That’s quite exciting. But then she was such a skilled teacher. I learned so much from her, and she could simply say to these kids, “Shall we look inside?” in quite a quiet voice with a knife and a chopping board.

And they go, “Oh, what’s going to be inside the pepper?” The suspense. I cannot describe how excited you can make a room full of five-year-olds about the question of we’ve looked outside the pepper, but what is inside?

And obviously, that’s something that actually doesn’t really get old. I mean, you do that with a pineapple. My word, the outside and inside of a pineapple.

And I think you’re right. I mean, my kids, my oldest child is now twenty-six. So I’ve seen a lot of stuff come and go in school over the years that they were growing up.

And I completely remember those things of the treats in school to reward good behaviour. And it kind of makes sense because our culture does this. But there is another way, and I would love it if more educators knew about it, which is you’re a skilled person who knows how to make kids excited about stuff.

If you combine your skills and authority and the fact that the kids kind of want to please you because you’re a very important person in their life, with the fact that a red bell pepper is automatically something exciting, magic happens.

Does sensory food education work for older kids?

I wonder what this looks like at the secondary level with preteens and teenagers. I don’t know if you have any experience with that, but so much of what you’re saying, I’m like this would absolutely work because I don’t know a lot of teenagers who really looked at the inside of a pineapple, particularly not American. Maybe if they’re from Latin America or someplace where that might be a more commonly eaten fruit, that might be something they’re familiar with. But even older kids, I think would love to do these lessons.

I agree. I wish that we had those resources. We haven’t yet because we’re a small team. We’re a tiny charity. We haven’t yet developed them.

I did do one pilot in a secondary school with eleven and twelve-year-olds. And what it confirmed was exactly what you’ve said, that A, they respond in the same way, and B, it’s even more needed. Because if you’ve reached the age of eleven or twelve and you’ve still never had a raw tomato, which was the case, it’s that much harder.

What I did find with each age range, so we’ve, I mean, it’s now in one thousand eight hundred schools and nurseries in the UK. That’s how many have signed up to use the resources.

That’s exciting.

It is very, very exciting. I’m very proud of the whole TastEd team and shout out to our director, Fran Box, who has done so much to roll it out to schools.

What we find with each age range as it goes up. So you work with the four-year-olds, and they are completely open to the world of food, but they don’t have the vocabulary. You do it with eight-year-olds, and suddenly they’re still open to it, but they’ve got this world of words and ways of expressing it.

But they get a little bit more self-conscious about trying. And what I found with eleven, twelve-year-olds, you suddenly had a whole bunch of embarrassment, self-consciousness, wanting to say, I hate mushrooms. So there’s kind of more attitude with the kids that age.

But that’s the reason why it’s even more important, I think, just to establish the buzz, the excitement. I remember with that group, we did different kinds of citrus fruit. That went down a storm.

But also, we did this one with lychees, which is when you said you’re not sure how kids would have tried a fresh pineapple. Fresh lychees, I think, are something, certainly in this country, they’re known by probably Chinese, British families, Asian families, but they’re a pretty unusual fruit to see in your average fruit bowl.

The kids were just entranced. And the teacher that I was piloting that with, he’s actually a history teacher, he’s head of humanities at that school. And he said to me a week later, he heard the kids having this animated conversation in the corridor about lychees. And he said, “I wish that I could achieve that level of retention with my history teaching”. In fact, he’s never heard them animatedly discussing history a week later.

And again, I would say to teachers out there, just do it for the sheer joy of it, apart from everything else.

Using herbs and spices to spark bigger conversations

Yeah, that idea of bringing in a more unfamiliar fruit or vegetable, I think it’s a fantastic one. Another thing that I’m thinking about for older kids might be herbs and spices. Like I really do like what you said about mint, comparing maybe parsley to cilantro or what is basil, ground spices versus fresh spices. I think there’s a lot there for kids to explore. And that’s also what they need to know.

Yeah, mortars and pestles are really fun as well. Because the aromatics from that, bring in some cumin, bring in some coriander seeds, let the kids pound it themselves.

And a chance for them to talk about what kinds of spices they use in their home? What’s their home culture? What kind of spices do they like? We can talk about the import of spices. We can talk about colonialism, imperialism.

Oh, you get into big conversations. Spice routes, trade routes. Absolutely.

We got into these a bit with the Tudor history, in terms of who gets to own food? Where does it come from? Why do some people have access to food and other people don’t?

The older the kids are, the richer those conversations are. And as you said, the cultural conversations, it can be wonderful because it can be a way for a child to talk about their cultural background with pride. You know, we had a child with cardamom, just saying, “This reminds me of my family when we visited Pakistan”, which is a country somewhat related to India. And it was a way for him to say this is my heritage, but in a kind of subtle way through the spice.

I think the spices also, there’s something that, you know, some fresh food can be tricky to source, or how do you kind of chop it or prepare it in the classroom? With spices, you’ve probably got a few spice jars at home. You don’t need a lot, just to give each child a little smell of cinnamon or a little taste of maybe some dried oregano or something like that. So many possibilities.

A simple cinnamon lesson you can try tomorrow

Oh, cinnamon. I hadn’t even thought about the sticks versus the ground cinnamon. Oh, my gosh. So my mind is just racing.

There’s a really simple cinnamon lesson that we do with all age groups. Wven if you do no other TastEd, you could just do this right away, which is, as you probably know, most of what we call taste actually happens in the nose. And this is a kind of groundbreaking fact for many adults, surprisingly, as well as kids.

So what we do is we bring in a little bit of ground cinnamon, and then we cut up some apple slices. Ideally, you have some carrot slices too, but you can just do it with the apple if you want. And you just get the kids to dip the apple in the cinnamon and then hold their nose. And you try it.

And they’ll say things like, “It’s like dust. I can’t taste it at all”. And then you unpinch your nose, and it’s like, the descriptions they have of their mouth filling with the cinnamon smell.

And they’re learning so much at once. They’re learning that flavor happens predominantly in the nose, which is something that not all of us know. But it’s also this kind of before and afterness of cinnamon that doesn’t taste of cinnamon, then suddenly the aroma, the perfume, the excitement of that cinnamon.

That’s a good one to do. Very simple.

I want to close out with a takeaway truth. What is something that you wish every teacher understood about food and this sensory engagement?

Children’s food preferences can change in quite dramatic ways.

And I think culturally we have this idea that it’s hard for kids to love vegetables, and that can be a reinforcing thing.

But what I’ve also seen is that it’s really easy for children to fall in love with vegetables.

And once you’ve got that love and that curiosity, it can stay with you for a lifetime.

So, what the simple truth is, I just want teachers to know kids’ preferences can change.

And the classroom is a great place to do that.

Get the free lesson and family resources from TastEd