The first grade history-social science framework adopted by the California State Board of Education includes the question “How do many people make one nation?” I can’t think of a better way to address this prompt than through the exploration of food in the United States. Our first grade Edible Social Studies unit starts with Norah Dooley’s and Peter J. Thornton’s book Everybody Cooks Rice. The protagonist, Carrie, goes looking for her brother Anthony and ends up taking a journey through the kitchens of her neighbors, who bring culinary traditions from Barbados, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, India, China, Haiti, and Italy to their now-also-American rice dishes.
In class, the first graders each introduced themselves and had the opportunity to share something about rice. Many students professed a love for Mexican rice, some shared about a delicious dish a family member makes, one student said she only likes plain white rice, and another mentioned having tried candy wrapped in edible rice paper. Together we used scissors to snip the green onions that came with the kit this week to garnish fried rice and sampled a dish that people in China began eating thousands of years ago as a way to use up leftover food. Special thanks to the many adults who helped students heat up the fried rice so they could enjoy it at home or from a learning hub warm.
When school was in person, I would start with a read aloud before we moved to the kitchen to cook, but since our class is now on Zoom and we have limited time together, students watched a read aloud of Grace Lin’s The Ugly Vegetables before class. I certainly wouldn’t call any of the vegetables featured in our fried rice ugly, but the unusual color of watermelon radish and purple cabbage definitely sets it apart. In the book, a Chinese American family grows vegetables in their garden that don’t look like the beautiful ornamental flowers in the neighbors’ gardens. Ultimately, after much hard work and patience, the vegetables are harvested and made into a soup that is enjoyed by everyone in the community.
While we ate, the first grade chefs watched a short clip from the Netflix show Ugly Delicious, which dedicated an entire episode to fried rice. In the clip, local San Franciscan and chef Brandon Jew cooks steak fried rice and talks about the iconic restaurants of San Francisco’s Chinatown and finding his way as a Chinese-American cook at his own restaurant, Mister Jiu’s. My hope is that our first graders will take our simple recipe and use it to reinvent leftovers into their teenage years and beyond!
