Activity: Feast Your Eyes

Author: Eve Pranis*

Overview: As students observe and describe foods, they enhance their abilities to distinguish different visual qualities.

Background

Feasting our eyes on food can trigger memories, get our salivary juices flowering, or turn us off altogether (think slimy!). They are our most used sense organ, but we often take them for granted. Like the other senses, eyes take in all kinds of information when they spot edible fare. Here are three general categories:

Form: This is the basic shape of an item. Students can describe foods in terms of simple shapes (e.g., round, flat), or compare them with other objects (looks like a butterfly . . . a braid).

Color: We come to expect our foods to be certain colors, but there's more to color than meets the eye! There's the basic color (e.g., red), its tone (dark red) and its intensity or brightness (bright or pale red). Our descriptions get more colorful yet when we describe the hue in terms of other objects (brick red or ruby red).

Total appearance: Our eyes also take in the whole picture. For instance, they can tell us whether a food is a cloudy liquid or a gel. They also give us a heads-up on qualities that we otherwise experience through our sense of touch (e.g., fuzzy or creamy). See what your keen observers notice when they take the time to really see.

Part I: Laying the Groundwork

Materials: two to four samples of foods that are in the same general category but that look different (e.g., types of apples, tomatoes, or breads)

Exploration
1.Have students work in small groups. Place the food samples you brought in on a table or counter and invite each group, in turn, to carefully observe the items, paying particular attention to their similarities and differences. Each group should create a chart with the item names across the top (e.g., Granny Smith apple, Cortland, Golden Delicious). If you have very young students, do this as a class.

2.Give students time to fill in their charts with descriptive words or phrases. Consider cutting open each sample. What new descriptions emerge? Which group of keen observers provides the most detailed descriptions? Combine the words and phrases on a class chart.

Making Connections
3. Challenge the class to group the words and phrases into categories that make sense to them (e.g., color words, textures, shapes). They'll come back to these later.

Part II: Capturing Colors

Materials: poster board; paints, colored paper, or both

Exploration 1. For very young students: Work together to create a class color chart using tempera paints or pieces of colored paper glued on poster board. It should include squares of the three primary colors (red, blue, yellow) and the three secondary colors (orange, green, and violet/purple). Ask students to find foods in newspapers and magazines and glue them on the chart, one for each color. They can use the same chart as they describe colors of foods they taste throughout the year.

For older students: Introduce a chromatic color chart. They will use it to identify food colors, including the "in-between" ones (e.g., yellowish green).

2. Another ways to describe a color is with words that indicate its tone: where it sits on a scale from light/white to dark/black (e.g., dark green spinach, light green lettuce) and by describing its brightness or intensity with words like bright, brilliant, clear, dull, or dusty. Discuss these concepts; together, find examples of classroom colors that students can describe with words that indicate a color's tone or intensity.

3. Finally, have students think about phrases that bring colors of other objects to mind. Share an example such as brick red, ruby red, or sky blue. Challenge students to secretly hunt around the classroom and identify objects they can describe using this approach. Each student should describe the color to a partner who will try to guess the mystery object.

Making Connections
4. Have a variety of mystery food samples on hand. Invite students to use their growing observation skills to describe the foods. Partners must sit back-to-back and take turns describing a mystery food using only visual descriptions. Have them use the categories they created in Part 1, Making Connections, or use these categories: shape, color, and overall appearance; students should share one descriptive word or phrase from each category before starting over.

Assessment: Check to see that students are observing more details and using a greater variety of descriptive words to portray the shape, color, and overall appearance of foods and other items.

Digging Deeper

Did You Know? Margarine's False Colors When margarine was first invented in the 1800s, it was colored yellow to look like butter. But the dairy industry didn’t like the competition. They persuaded many states to outlaw yellow margarine, reasoning that people wouldn’t want natural margarine because it was white, like lard. To get around the bans, margarine producers packaged their product with a tiny pouch of orange coloring (made from a spice, called annatto). People could mix in the coloring to get a more appealing-looking product!

Setting Sights on Similes
Challenge students to use similes to describe the state or condition of food: granular like sugar, liquid like water, creamy like mayonnaise. Next, have them do the same for shapes (flat like a pancake, long and thin like spaghetti). Finally, have them focus on the overall look (wrinkled like a dried plum, hairy like a kiwi, polished like a cherry). From there, students can creatively extend the similes to other objects; for example, soft like a peach might become a soft peach like the cheek of a child.

Does Food Color Matter?
Ask the class, Do you ever find that you like or dislike a food, in part, because of its color? Have students share some examples. Ask, How does the color make you feel? Does it remind you of something else? Do you think it affects the taste? How? Invite students to explore this last question with one or more of the following activities:

• Survey students to find out whether they prefer white or yellow American cheese. Invite them to do a taste test, blindfolded, using a cheese sample of each color. (Make sure to buy the identical brand.) Record students' experiences, discoveries, and questions.
• Pour milk into two cups or jars. Leave one plain and put blue food coloring in another. Show them to students and solicit their responses. Ask, Which looks more appealing? Which do you think will taste better, and why? Follow up with a taste test.
• Read and discuss the Dr. Seuss book Green Eggs and Ham.
  

Food Photographers Sell Eye Appeal

Did You Know? Favoring Fast Food Seventy percent of food advertising is for convenience food, candy, snacks, soft drinks, and desserts. Only 2.2 percent is spent on advertising for fruits and vegetables, grains or beans. (Source: Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition & Health, University of California Press, 2002.)

Bring in some samples of ads from magazines, flyers, or food containers that feature food advertisements with tempting photos. (Try to find at least one image of a fast-food burger.) Show the class the photos one-by-one and ask, How does this photograph make you feel? What do you think the ad creators wanted you to feel? Does it make you want to buy the product? Have you ever had this product? Did it look as good or taste as good as it looked in the ad? Discuss the fact that advertisers trying to sell foods want them to look as delicious as possible, even if it involves a little trickery! After all, certain foods are hard to photograph. Think of what would happen to an ice cream sundae under hot lights at a photo shoot. Other foods might wilt or get soggy. Food photography is big business, so advertisers employ stylists to prepare the food for the shoot. Here are some tricks of the trade:

• spraying grapes with baby powder to make them look natural
• putting oil on fruits to make them shine
• mixing white glue with cereal (looks like milk, but won't make cereal soggy!)
• painting burgers to give them that brown, grilled, juicy look
• propping up burgers on a bun with toothpicks and cardboard so they look fat (and gluing on sesame seeds so they look just right)

Challenge the class to continue using their critical eyes when they see food ads and ask, What techniques might the advertiser be using to persuade me to buy this? Is this likely to be as good as it looks?

*Activity inspired by Italy's Saying, Doing, Tasting: Taste Education Journeys in School.

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More Taste Education Articles and Activities

Cultivating Taste: Beyond the Food Pyramid

Come to Your Senses
Food: A Touching Experience
Growing a Knowing Nose
Flavor Sleuths: Making Sense of Taste

Savoring Flavors: Local Tastes Compete

Standards Addressed by Taste Education Activities