Going Back to School...

The first internship in my gap year is one I haven’t yet talked about. It was between the end of school and the beginning of my stint at APB.

Shortly before I finished 12^th grade, I realized that I wanted to explore careers in the world of food other than being a Chef. So I began to think of alternative paths, and different aspects of food. It didn’t take me long to arrive at ‘Nutritionist’. It was a confluence of food and biology, two subjects I love!

Ironically, in the 9^th grade, my interest in Bio had meant I couldn’t take the Food and Nutrition (F&N) class, because Bio and F&N was an either/or pair of electives. Back then I hadn’t anticipated such an interest specifically in nutrition.

So by the time I finished high school, I had never formally studied F&N. I expressed this concern to my ever-supportive Principal, Mr. Satish Jayarajan, who has guided me at every stage of my gap year process. He was generous enough to suggest -- even after I had graduated -- that I could spend some time in the school’s F&N department, sitting in on classes as well as assisting the teacher where I could, to try and learn a bit about the subject.

So that’s just what I did. For a month I went back to school everyday, in half-uniform (School T-shirt with jeans) and reported to the F&N teacher, Mrs. Sarin, who happily welcomed me to her department.

I attended all the F&N classes from 9^th grade to 12^th grade everyday, learning what they were learning. I learned about the nutritional needs of different age groups of people and how to plan meals for each. I learned about bread and its chemical behavior, about cheese and how its made, about meats and the chemical processes they goes through from the time the animal is reared to the time it ends up on a plate.

It was very interesting to get to see this other side of the foods we eat: the reasons behind eating certain things and the chemical behavior of the things we cook and consume everyday. That’s what had drawn me to F&N in the first place.

Apart from sitting in on classes, Mrs. Sarin also gave me tasks like reading the course material for a class beforehand so I could ask the students questions, correct some of their simple class assignments, or sometimes even teach a class! Like one day, I was asked to explain to a class of 10^th graders the different categories of cheese and how they are made.

Mrs. Sarin even asked me to assist her in guiding and assessing a few practical lessons, to get a thorough feel of the subject she taught.

Granted, I only got to learn fragments of the curriculum in the short month that I was there, but the advantage was that I got a taste of what the subject of Food & Nutrition is all about.

I’ll admit it was bit strange going back to school just months after I’d graduated; the line between student and alumnus was sometimes blurred… But it was an interesting situation, to be back in school, without a classroom or my classmates, independent.

Over the course of that stint, through discussions with Mrs. Sarin and a few other people, it slowly hit me just how much of a scientific field F&N really is. My teachers have observed in the past that while I like my sciences (like Bio), I tend to lean more towards humanities. And sure enough, while I’m fascinated by the scientific perspectives of nutrition, it is the cultural and historical aspects of food that draw me more.

Each and every one of my experiences over the past year has added to my learning in some way or another. My stint at the F&N department taught me a thing or two about food behavior, which is fundamental to understanding food as a whole entity. And this will definitely help me with my future learnings about food.