Practice Mindful Eating

What You Need:

• Fruit of your choice (tangerines work well for this activity)
• Mindful Eating worksheet

What You Do:

1. Explain that while we eat every day, we rarely really taste our food and think about where it came from.
2. Share that in this activity,  your students will explore all of the sensations of eating a piece of fruit.
3. Have students pick up the piece of fruit and really observe it. They should engage their senses through smelling it, touching it, really seeing it. You can even ask them to place the fruit by their ears and see if they hear anything.
4. Now have students think about all the causes and conditions that resulted in that fruit being in their hands: the sun, the soil, the rain, the farmers, the truck driver that transported the fruit, the fruit seller, etc.
5. Have students place the fruit in their mouths and instruct them not to take a large bite or chew at first. Have them notice what the fruit feels like in their mouth. When they are ready to take a bite, have them savor each bit and slowly chew, really taking in all the flavors and sensations of the fruit on their tongue, in their mouth, and going down their throat.
6. Optional: If using raisins or berries, have students first eat one piece normally and then have them observe the fruit and reflect on where it came from and eat another. Then have them discuss how their experience was different between eating the fruit normally vs. mindful eating.  
7. Ask students to complete the reflection questions on the Mindful Eating worksheet.

Meena Srinivasan, MA, National Board Certified Teacher, is a leader in the fields of Mindful Awareness Practices (MAP) and Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). She is the author of Teach, Breathe, Learn: Mindfulness In and Out of the Classroom (Parallax Press, 2014) and SEL Everyday: Integrating Social and Emotional Learning With Instruction in Secondary Classrooms (Norton, 2019).