Teaching Taste for Sustainable Development in Home Economics Education

In Denmark as well as other countries, recent years have seen a ‘turn’ in Home Economics Education in compulsory school. Previously, the focus was on practical skills, health and nutrition. Today, there is more focus on taste as a quality of food and meals, and on sustainability and health as more than something bodily or nutritional. This symposium focuses on taste and sustainable development, which will be explored and discussed. The symposium is based on Wistoft & Qvortrup (2019) Teaching Taste; and Wistoft & Qvortrup (2020) Seven dimensions of taste: taste in a sociological and educational perspective. The panel will include short presentations by Wistoft (systems and dimensions of taste), Qvortrup (structural links between taste dimensions: How sustainability as an aspect of moral taste influences cooking and food aesthetics, i.e. pleasant taste) and Christensen (empirical examples and research findings of teaching taste for sustainable development). Other contributions are very welcome.The research symposium combines theoretical and empirical approaches, including taste philosophy, systems theory, didactics and empirical studies with a focus on effectiveness research. The theoretical findings include a) the development of a systematic model of taste dimensions that can be directly translated into a HHE curriculum b) students’ understanding of the differentiation of knowledge forms related to different taste dimensions, with a particular focus on the importance of education for sustainable development. The empirical findings demonstrate that teaching taste is an effective didactic approach that all students can benefit from in achieving learning objectives.Conclusion: Home Economics Education with a focus on taste has significant positive effects on the inclusion of students with different socio-economic backgrounds, on the understanding of taste as a broad cultural phenomenon, on the ability to use different forms of argument for different taste dimensions, and – not least – on students’ understanding of sustainable development as an integrated element in all links of the food chain.