Antonia volunteered at least once a month in both Damon and Ariel’s classrooms as they progressed through grade school. She would meet with their teachers to learn what they were studying each month and then design and create food-based units of study on those topics. All units involved preparing foods and learning about their cultural background and history. Students loved these lessons, as they made their academic subjects come alive. Antonia was also hired as a consultant to develop and teach units of study for the county she lived in. Additionally, she had opportunities to travel to other countries and taught children outside of the U.S. the same lessons. She was curious to find out if her teaching methods around food crossed cultural lines and was happy to learn that they did.

Over a period of twenty-five years Antonia was engaged formally and informally in food literacy education projects. Her consistent observation working with many diverse groups was that the kids were the easy part if they were engaged in hands-on sensory-based learning about food. The problem was often adult perceptions about kids and a lack of understanding and appreciation of their natural curiosity about the world. Children first learn through sensory experimentation. They touch, taste, see, smell, and listen to what is going on around them to make sense of their surroundings from sensory data they absorb. Educators do not often take advantage of this sensory receptivity to the environment as a starting point for learning.

A growing frustration that Antonia had was that many educators did not really take this work seriously, an attitude she believes stems from a fundamental bias about what is perceived as “woman’s work”. Women all over the world feed and care for children, no matter what their educational or cultural background. Increasingly in the U.S. many women were having to get jobs outside the home for economic reasons; the nuclear family with stay-at-home moms was becoming a thing of the past. At the same time, convenience foods that required little if any preparation flooded the market. Scientists were making connections about the role diet plays in disease and the diet-related diseases were affecting younger people at an alarming rate.

When Antonia was in her mid-forties she decided one way to gain credibility for food literacy education and the work she had been engaged in while raising her family was to go back to school and get a research degree at a major research institution. That was her motivation for entering first a master’s and then a Ph.D. program at nearby Cornell University. Antonia studied nutrition, education, and anthropology and conducted groundbreaking research around food acceptance while at the university. She combined these interests and formalized her food-based lessons into a curriculum called Food is Elementary. This curriculum combines nutrition education, culinary arts, botany, and traditional foodways, making learning about food, science and culture accessible and fun for students of all ages. Joan Roos Egner, one of Antonia’s professors in the field of education who also served on her graduate committee said, “Antonia is a superb teacher who masterfully works with teachers to implement her program and integrate a wide variety of disciplines.  The curriculum is a creative example of education and nutrition at its best.”

At Cornell Antonia discovered Ellen Swallow Richards, founder of the home economics movement, and was shocked to learn that most people had never heard of Ellen Richards even though the College of Human Ecology would not exist if it weren’t for her work. Antonia had taken a course on the history of home economics and as she read a biography of Ms. Richards she was amazed at what this woman had accomplished in the late 1800’s into the early 1900’s. A chemist by training, Ellen Richards applied scientific principles to the home environment and made major contributions to public health and nutrition education. She was very energetic in her research and she conducted multiple studies that addressed the quality of air, water and food. She coined the word ecology and had a very holistic approach to thinking about the relationship between people and their environment in daily life. Ellen Richards was also the first woman to attend and teach at M.I.T. Every chance she gets, Antonia spreads the word about Ellen Richards, a heroine who is a great inspiration and has shaped her own research and innovative approach to food literacy education.

For her doctoral research, Antonia designed and conducted a major research study titled “Food education in the elementary classroom as a means of gaining acceptance of diverse, low-fat foods in the school lunch program”. Her research took place at an elementary school in Trumansburg, New York over the course of nine months. Half of the classrooms served as the intervention group with the other half serving as the control. Experiential learning about foods in the classroom was the independent variable. Foods were cooked in the intervention classrooms by the children as they learned some of the history and lore of the new food. The same low-fat food was then offered as part of the hot lunch. Consumption measurements were taken for all students who ate hot lunch, every time a new dish was offered. This involved weighing the new food before and after it was served to the children. This was a critical step to determine whether, after experiencing food in the classroom, the children would eat the new food when it was then served in the cafeteria. The new food was served in the cafeteria within a week of the time that was introduced in the intervention classes. The intervention group and control group were then compared. This research used both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. A sample of 91 intervention students were interviewed pre and post intervention. Parents in both groups received a questionnaire at the end of the school year and comparisons between the groups were made with chi square analysis.

Results were overwhelmingly positive and consistent. The intervention children ate much more of the new food when it was offered in the school lunch program than did the control children. The control children rarely touched the new food. The intervention children learned about foods from other cultures and basic nutrition. Parents of intervention children reported positive change in family dietary habits. The research demonstrated that experiential learning about food in the classroom is a powerful technique for gaining acceptance of diverse, low-fat foods in the school lunch program.