TastEd Blog

July 2023

TastEd at the Department for Education Early Years Foundation Stage Event

Engaging the Senses With Practitioners. When the National Food Strategy was published we were delighted to see Henry Dimblely and his team recommend that sensory food education should be added to the Early Years curriculum. Since then we have been working with the Department for Education (DfE) Early Years Foundation Stage...

May 2023

GUEST BLOG: TastEd Comes to Sheffield!

Eat Smart Sheffield is a Whole School & Settings Approach to Food and Nutrition programme commissioned by Sheffield City Council and developed and delivered by Learn Sheffield. Focused on encouraging and supporting pupils, families and the community to adopt healthier eating behaviours, it has two main aims: To give schools the...

February 2023

TastEd wins prestigious BBC Food and Farming Award

Back in the middle of 2022, TastEd was shortlisted as a finalist for the BBC Food and Farming Awards under the Innovation category. These awards, running for over 20 years, each year celebrate the incredible work to promote good food across the UK food system, so to be shortlisted in...

August 2022

How can you teach the Great Fire of London through Food Education?

The idea that food education is important and that it should be about exploration and finding joy in healthy food is not a controversial one. However, there’s one big barrier that comes up over and over again when we speak to teachers, and that’s time! Teachers tell us it’s hard...

April 2022

In Memory of Lesley Mackley

Lesley Mackley was one of the quiet heroes of both food education and food writing in the U.K. We were so sad to hear of her death in March this year and were extremely moved and grateful when Lesley’s family (Tilly, Mark and Henry) contacted us to say that instead...

TastEd Receives Extremely Generous Donation of £100,000 from The Jane Goodman Trust

If I had to choose just one word to describe my friend Jane Goodman, it would be ‘generous’. If you gave me two words to describe her instead of one, I would go for ‘extremely generous’. Jane Goodman lived and worked in Islington. She was a paediatric dental specialist. She loved...

March 2022

TastEd comes to Islington

Our year at TastEd got off to a great start. Ever since we formed as an organisation at the start of 2019, our dream has been to help as many children as possible in the U.K. benefit from sensory food education. We believe that taste education should be a universal...

December 2021

Sharing TastEd with School Families and Communities

As part of Prendergast Primary’s Food Week, each class from Reception to Year 6 experienced a different TastEd lesson every day. But, lessons weren’t exclusively for children. Parents and carers in years 3-6 were invited to a Food Week Assembly as part of the Harvest celebration for a taste of what...

November 2021

TastEd and The University of Cambridge Primary School

One of the projects that we’ve been most excited about over the past few months has been a collaboration with the University of Cambridge Primary School. The school is one of the first (along with Washingborough Academy in Lincolnshire) to adopt TastEd in every year group and the feedback from...

TastEd receives a £12,000 grant from The Jane Goodman Charitable Trust

TastEd would like to say a huge thank you to the Jane Goodman Charitable Trust for its generous grant which has enabled us to make a number of videos to help schools get started with TastEd, working with talented and award-winning film-maker Tom Perry (https://www.tomperryfilms.com/). Thanks to this grant we were...

September 2021

A Teacher’s View – Sensory Food Education in the Early Years

Ruth Platt - Senior Lecturer Practitioner in Education at Anglia Ruskin University Many schools report that children coming out of lockdown have returned to school less healthy than before the pandemic. To help children to become mentally and physically healthier, it is time that food education is brought out of the...

August 2021

How can you encourage children to try new fruits and vegetables?

Like Oddbox, here at TastEd, we know that fruits and veg comes in all different shape, sizes and colours. However, as Oddbox says on their website 'our food system in the UK has grown to prize uniformity over taste and planet. This means fruit & veg that’s fresh and perfectly...

May 2021

In Memory of Einar Risvik, Taste Education Pioneer

All of us at TastEd were so sad to hear the news that Einar Risvik died of cancer on Sunday 23rd May in Oslo. Einar was the person who introduced sensory education for children in Norway – the equivalent of TastEd. He was one of the creators of Norwegian taste...

February 2021

Happier meals with Bee Wilson and Kim Smith

On Tuesday the 16th February TastEd hosted a brilliant talk between renowned food writer and co-founder of TastEd Bee Wilson and food educator and TastEd co-chair Kim Smith. We were joined on YouTube and Facebook live by over 100 people. An informal hour of discussion took place covering how the techniques...

June 2020

Herbs & Memories by Naomi Rayner

If you want to get an idea of TastEd, one of the simplest ways is to take a fresh mint leaf, smell it and try to say what it reminds you of. We do this as an ice breaker in our teacher training sessions and we also do it in...

Playing with Your Food by A Parent

Like many people, I was brought up not to play with my food. To those of the wartime generation, there was an understandable fear of wasting so much as a scrap and a sense that playing with what was on your plate somehow disrespectful. But what if playing with food...

April 2020

TastEd and Veg Power

Earlier this spring, when it was hard to imagine we would now be in lockdown, the TastEd team was thrilled to collaborate with Veg Power on the launch of their 2020 schools programme. Veg Power is an organisation on a mission to get British children to eat more vegetables –...

March 2020

TastEd Fun and Games for Families at Home

The Easter holidays have come early for many families. In the wake of coronavirus, so many of us are self isolating at home, going a little crazy behind closed doors, wondering how to fill the hours and weeks until children go back to school. Here are a few fun and...

January 2020

New Year’s Resolutions

Happy New Year from TastEd! This is the season of diet resolutions. As individuals, many of us are resolving to eat less of this or that food. But what if some of that spirit of change could be applied in a more positive and social way to helping children learn about...

December 2019

What’s in a name? The Story of Sapere

Stina Algotson is Chair of the Board of Sapere international. Her presentation at the Sapere conference held in Cambridge in October told us that the Latin word ’sapere’ (pronounced ‘sap-er-ay') means “to know”, “to be able to”, “to taste” and “to feel”. Latin-dictionary.net adds that the three meanings are...