New Resource Pack for schools: Food, Nutrition, and Cooking

Cooking class at Duluth Normal School, c. 1920. University of Minnesota-Duluth, Kathryn A. Martin Library, University Archives: https://collection.mndigital.org/catalog/umd:77. Accessed May 2, 2024.

This month’s resource pack was created by request for Middle School Family and Consumer Science instruction. If your teachers need research, ebooks, and primary sources around particular instructional content, fill out the Resource Pack Request form and our team will add it to our list of monthly topics for the 2024-25 school year.

Food, nutrition, and cooking are excellent topics for use in the classroom. Not only are they essential for health and wellness, they can also be used as portals to learn about science, history, culture, and social dynamics.

Starting with eLibraryMN, elementary students can read an overview of nutrition in Britannica and learn about carbohydrates, dehydration, fast food, and more in Explora Primary. All article links can also be shared for the whole class to read at once, or students can use the database to search and find their own articles of interest.

Middle and high school students can also explore all things food, nutrition, and cooking in the eLibraryMN databases. Gale in Context provides a Nutrition collection for Middle and High, with links to research, audio, video, and more on topics such as drinking soda or food insecurity. Ebsco’s Explora provides a Nutrition and Physical Wellness area for Middle and High with focused topics like Energy Drinks, BMI, and Food Allergies. And for students ready to think about the impact of food on policy, topics such as junk food in schools, taxes on sugary foods, and trans fats bans can be viewed from different perspectives in the Points of View Reference Center.  

Ebooks Minnesota has food and cooking content for students of every age. From picture books like ‘I Eat Well’ to explorations of healthy eating through vegetarianism in Vegetarian cooking around the world, and whole foods in titles like Unprocessed: revitalize your health with whole foods, students can find ebooks to support any type of curiosity they have about how to cook and eat. There are also many cookbooks in Ebooks Minnesota, with focused, specialized content for every unique taste. Try The complete photo guide to candy making, The Scooby-Doo! Cookbook, or Walk-around tacos: and other likeable lunches to pull students into fun and delicious cooking ideas.

Finally, the Minnesota Digital Library is full of primary sources about food and cooking from Minnesota's past. Highlights include photographs of cooking classes, descriptions of home economics courses, historical menus and recipes, images of people making and sharing food, and much more. Teachers and students may also enjoy digging deeper into food history through these online exhibits: Farm to Table, Minnesota Immigrants: Traditional Foods, and Minnesota Apples: Historic Recipes.

These items and so many more are on the Resource Pack guide, and in the e-resources themselves. Have a topic that you'd like us to focus on in the future? Share it with us and we'll add it to the list!

*Resource packs are theme-based and support Minnesota K12 Academic standards. We plan to release one resource pack per month during the school year, and fully review all content each summer to ensure that all resources are current and up to date. Please submit any ideas you have for resource pack topics that would be helpful for teachers and students and we will add them to the list of future topics.

Each pack will be in a Libguide format that librarians and teachers can share with colleagues. Resources will be curated around the month’s theme, and will be broken into tabs for younger and older students. Packs can be accessed by unlimited users with no login, and all links will be formatted to ensure seamless access within Minnesota borders.