Food Faces! Connecting Food with Literature Part 1: “The Barren Grounds”
Are you teaching David A. Robertson’s The Barren Grounds this year or just reading it for fun? There are so many great ways to use food to connect with this award winning story. We’ll talk about broth and trapping another day, a staple for the kids and animals as they venture to the Green Time. Today, I wanted to look at an important moment at the beginning of the book that centres around food - the making of food faces.
In the first chapter of the book, Morgan, the main character, notices that her foster father has arranged her breakfast food to create a face on her plate: “The scrambled eggs resemble a mop of curly hair. The bacon strips were decidedly fat lips. Two orange slices were ears, and the final two were eyes” (5).
This is an important moment for Morgan’s character development. She is finally in a foster home where the parents seem to genuinely care about her and she knows that this breakfast signals that this foster home is different from her past ones. She reflects that this breakfast face is “better than finding a note on the kitchen table telling her to ‘Eat what’s left’ and sitting alone with a bowl of dry cereal because there was only expired milk in the fridge. Cereal from the bottom of the box, crumbs that only milk could save” (7).
Yet, she resents James’ and Katie’s attempts to make this house a home. It’s not her home. She doesn’t remember her home and this is a major vulnerability for her. It is, in fact, the main conflict of the entire novel. She tries to express these complex emotions by rearanging the food plate in terms they might be able to understand. She “[takes] one of the slices of bacon, [breaks] it in two, and positions a piece over each eye. She [makes] the other bacon slice into a frown, then push[es] the plate towards James [saying:] ‘There! You’ve looked too happy lately” (8).
Food is thus the means through which the author allows the main character to interact with the secondary characters and advance the plot. Given that it’s in the first chapter, it’s a way for the reader to learn about Morgan’s past and learn about the internal and external conflicts that will drive this plot.
There are lots of moments like this in The Barren Grounds and other books we’ll look at in future blogs. Focusing on them allows us to study how our own food habits shape our view of the world. How we might use food to lighten a situation, to connect with others, to build ties. We can also see how food might be used by different cultural groups and how food can create conflict and misunderstanding. Next time you read The Barren Grounds, look more closely at the way food serves to drive the plot. Throught the pages, food is used to discuss: cultural appropriated, food insecurity, harvesting practices, medicinal teachings…
I have often made food faces in my own life. As a child, we occasionally made what my mother called “fancy lunches” which were a chance to build our own plates and play with our food. As a parent, I now recognize this as a strategy for using up leftovers or a strategy to hide the fact that I don’t have time to make a “proper” lunch. But, as a kid, this is another one of those food moments that shaped me into the adult and parent I’ve become. These fun food moments were a chance to be creative and innovative. They were different from regular lunches so they stand out as special. Whether you’ll be studying or reading The Barren Grounds or not, these suggestions are innovative way to get your kids to engage with the material or be more excited to eat.
Here are some fun activities you can do in your home or classroom:
English Language Arts
Have students build a face and then write a story about the character they’ve created.
Have students write out the instructions for building their specific face.
Have students research where the food they are using comes from.
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Math
Discuss ratios and fractions - how much of the face is meat, dairy, red, white, dry, wet, healthy, unhealthy.
Discuss weight - challenge students to get the closest to a certain weight or have them weigh their plates. You can make links to density by looking at why/how some foods are heavier than others. How dehydration makes some foods lighter while preserving makes others food denser.
Study geometry by looking at the ways in which an item’s shape creates options for different facial features.
Nutrition and Health
Make links to Canada’s Food Guide and see who can build the healthiest plate.
Discuss food options to understand the pros and cons of the different options for living a healthy life.
Consider the ways in which the different items fuel the human body and what a plate heavier in carbohydrates might provide in terms of sustenance versus a plate that’s heavier in protein.
Discuss balancing food groups.
History and Indigenous Studies
There are lots of links that can be made to Indigenous food practices by talking about foods that are part of traditional teachings or medicines. Inviting an elder or a member of your Indigenous community is a way to build cultural understanding and work towards reconciliation. (It’s important to avoid cultural appropriation or sharing information from a colonial perspective.)
Make links between the food offered for the activity and past times or occasions when food was scarce. Make a face of food that soldiers could access in the trenches, for example, or in a specific era.
Art
Talk about colour by looking at which foods are primary and secondary colours. Discuss how the natural ingredients created the item’s final colour.
Talk about shapes to see how different shapes can yield different results.
Study a food’s texture to see how different foods can be used to achieve different results.
Geography
Map out where food comes from in the world and trace the item’s journey from the place it originated to the classroom or your home.
Consider what geographical features are needed to create the environment for the food to grow.
Discuss how export and import practices have shaped our world and contribute to global concerns like deforestation, sustainability, global warming…