Step into the Food Culture Camp and savor the food culture on the tip of your tongue

1. These Four Days

In the days before this camp started, I sometimes wondered whether the kids would get bored, spending four days in a row dealing with everything related to "food" the whole time. Every day it was just buying, prepping, cooking, eating, cleaning up, over and over and over. Actually, it was a bit like letting the kids try out what Mom does every day, for four days, and see how it felt.

The theme of this camp was not "cooking technique." On the first day of camp, the three adults leading it (me, Strawberry, and Bolin) immediately made it clear to the kids: the three of us are not good at cooking at all, at least definitely not as good as your mom.

So what qualifies us to lead this camp?

The kid: "Ah, you're just conning us out of money!"

The adults wondered, why do kids always hate cleaning up? Why do they still want to eat popsicles even when they know they're bad? Why not choose to go to Carrefour on the last day? And the kids wondered, why do we have to "question each other" like this? Why do we have to study things? Why the limit of at most eight people? These four days of activities ended amid this series of questions.

"If you had to give these four days a theme, what would you choose?"

"The Having-Fun-Cooking Camp!" "The Magical-Cooking Camp!" "The Eat-and-Drink-Your-Fill Camp!" "The Go-to-7-Eleven Camp!"

Over these four days, what exactly did the kids gain?

Maybe a bit more knowledge about food safety, and a bit more cooking skill. But for me, what I remember most clearly is the smile in the wrinkles of that vegetable-selling auntie, and the hand of Brother Xu the pork vendor as he held the meat.

Article from a friend: Teacher Luo Shizhe (Tainan Shu)