Fried plantain. Milk soup. Goat curry.

Until recently, I had never tried any of these dishes. It was only when I began to explore cuisines beyond the ones I grew up with that I realised how much I’d been missing out - and this got me thinking about our relationship with food in school.

Food is such a fundamental part of life, but outside of optional food technology, we hardly address it in school beyond studying feasting in the Tudor court in history and digestion in biology. Why is this?

Everyone agrees that cultural education is important. Yet, in the past, the focus for delivering it has often been on organised trips to galleries and museums (impossible during Covid). We pay very little attention to expanding students’ culinary horizons.

I believe we are missing a trick here. If we want better cultural education, then food needs to be part of the journey that we take our students on. And what better way to deliver this than through school dinners?

In the past, our school has provided themed Christmas, Diwali and Eid lunches, and there are daily halal and non-halal options in the dining hall. But this is the minimum we should expect. We can do better.

That is why we have decided to finish this academic year with a Culture Week: each day, the dining hall will serve food from a different continent, culminating in the Friday focus on Asian food.

Admittedly there have been some challenges in the planning: the fryers are usually only used on Fridays; coconut ice cream is prohibitively expensive; plantain is not available from the regular suppliers; and the head chef tells me that few of our pupils are likely to eat milk soup.

Nonetheless, the planning goes on. We will overcome these hurdles, and I am confident that the resulting week will be a celebration of the strength and diversity of the school community (and a credit to our catering team).

I am hopeful that it will inspire our pupils to share their stories of favourite meals, comfort food and tastes of home, too. For me, that means Kendal Mint Cake, Grasmere gingerbread and parkin. I’m looking forward to sharing my tastes of home with pupils during this special week and I know many of my colleagues are excited to do the same.

We’re also providing lessons on diversity, inclusion and culture across the school. In history, there will be a focus on the experiences of Chinese, Indian and Native American soldiers in the First World War. The Spanish department also has a range of activities planned to immerse pupils in Latin American culture. The week is about much more than food, but I bet it will be the food that lots of our pupils remember the most.

Gemma Hargraves is a secondary school history teacher and head of lower school

This article originally appeared in the 18 June 2021 issue under the headline “A continental feast can make diversity easy to digest”