Mexico
III: MEXICAN CULTURE
Part 4: Mexico's Rich Culinary Culture
Overview:
Food provides a window into many important aspects of culture. Mexico has a
rich culinary history. Corn and chocolate, along with other familiar foods,
have connections to the indigenous peoples of Mexico, and have played important
roles
in the diets of Mexicans and in sacred rituals in Mexico. Listed below are many
links to lesson and unit plans that explore the cultural and culinary history
of corn and chocolate, as well as their production. Although they don't have
the same sacred connections, chile peppers, also grown in Mexico and Latin America,
have an interesting history and can spark students' interest. An introduction
to the Scoville scale, created by Wilbur Scoville, which measures the pungency,
or "heat," of chile peppers, provides a way to introduce Mexican culture in
the science or mathematics classroom.
Objectives:
Students will be introduced to the Scoville scale, which measures the pungency
of chile peppers.
Students will learn terminology associated with chile peppers.
Students will graph the pungency of several different types of peppers.
Grade Level:
Elementary to middle school (adaptable to high school using resources and
extensions, below)
Time Required:
One class period
Materials:
Transparency or copies of The Scoville Heat Units Scale [PDF]
Background information on Wilbur Scoville (beneficial, but not necessary)
Examples or images of different types of chiles (beneficial, but not necessary)
Graph paper and colored pencils, markers or crayons, or access to computers
with graphing capability
Teachers may direct students to the Student Resources Pages where they can follow relevant links without having access to lesson plans.
Procedure:
-
Begin by asking students if they have eaten hot foods and if they know
what causes foods to be "hot." Introduce them to chile peppers by showing
them a variety of chiles and ask them to guess which would be the hottest.
Ask them to explain their rationale for their guesses. Some may say size
or color were their determining factors. Introduce them to the term Capsaicin
(cap-say-a-sin), which is what puts the heat, burn or pungency in chiles.
Explain that size and color have no effect on whether one chile will be
hotter than other chiles. There are red peppers that aren't hot at all,
for example.
-
Distribute copies or project a transparency of the Scoville scale. Show
students different types of chiles and then show them their rating on the
Scoville scale. Teachers may want to explain to older students the process
of rating a chile on the Scoville scale.
-
Give students graph paper and colored pencil or markers, or have them
run a graphing program on their computers. Choose three to five types of
chiles for them to graph. Have students find the number of Scoville units
for each chile pepper and then construct a graph that shows the number of
Scoville units (level of pungency) and the type of chile peppers. Each chile
should be represented in a different color for emphasis.
Extensions:
Depending on time and age level, students could
- compare the level of pungency of peppers using fractions
- grow a chile pepper garden (Seeds available through the Chile Pepper Institute
in links section)
- measure and graph the size of the chile peppers
- write word problems using the names of chile peppers and the number of
Scoville units
- research other types of foods or spices to determine their number of Scoville
units
- research why capsaicin causes the mouth to burn and the body's response
to it
- research how to neutralize the burning sensation caused by chiles
Resources:
(Links will open in new windows.)
General Food Resources
The Food Timeline. This site offers over 100 lesson and unit plans that focus on food, food history,
the economics of food, food production, food of other cultures, food psychology,
food science, and the advertising of food and food packaging.
Feeding Minds, Fighting
Hunger offers lesson plans from elementary to high school level that introduce
students to the problems of hunger and malnutrition.
Mexican Foods
Daily Lesson Plan: Cuisine Art. This New York Times Learning Network Lesson plan contains a lesson related
to a New York Times article, "First the Mexicans, then the Food, which explores
ethnicity through food.
Chocolate Resources and Lessons
The Field Museum of Chicago's All about Chocolate Web site.
The Field Museum's Coaoa Connections: From Beans to Bars - A Resource
Kit for Educators contains a wealth of information and lessons plans about
the history, growing, eating and making of chocolate and its importance to
many cultures, including Mexico. The Web site that accompanies these lessons
is informative and beautifully designed. The interactive Chocolate Challenge
is a great way to test students' previous knowledge of chocolate or evaluate
how much they learned.
The Sweet Lure of Chocolate contains the history of chocolate in the
Amazon, Mexico, and Europe, as well as a video tour of a chocolate factory
and a discussion of chocolate and health. This site created by the Exploratorium.
A History of Chocolate: From the Americas to Europe, From the Sacred to the Sublime. A ten day unit plan with lessons including chocolate time lines, poems,
recipes, scripts, crossword puzzles, trivia questions, and concept maps.
Chocolate Corner Timeline of Chocolate History. A short timeline of the history of chocolate.
Corn Resources and Lessons
A multi-age unit plan that explores corn created by the national Corn Growers
Association. This site does not contain much information about Mexico.
Ethnobotany. This unit plan focuses on how the ancient Maya used corn.
Kid's Gardening. There are many Web sites devoted to encouraging students and schools to raise
gardens, and corn or chile peppers could be grown in a school garden.
Crayola's Web site includes a lesson on making corn husk dolls.
Chile Pepper Resources
National Geographic's lesson plan on spices is broad enough that many aspects
of it could relate to Mexican spices, specifically chiles.
The Chile Pepper Institute's site is very informative about all aspects
of chiles.
Brief history of the chile pepper.
Explanation of the Scoville scale and its invention.
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