May 03, 2026

Topic Challenge: Food Around the World

47 minutes

Welcome back to another episode of the BIG Home Ed Conversations Podcast. Kelly and Ashley are continuing Season 5’s “topic from a hat” home education challenge — where they pick a theme, explore it with their kids for the week (without telling each other what they’re doing), then come back to compare notes, resources, and real-life learning.

This week’s topic: Food Around the World — and it takes them way beyond “trying new recipes”, into geography, history, climate, farming, food miles, hunger relief, and how food choices impact communities and the planet.

Season 5 Sponsor: Strew (and the feature we’re loving this week)

This season is sponsored by Strew — a home education logging app developed by a UK home educating mum and her brother. They’ve given us access to the app and we’re using it to track what we’re doing and share what we’re enjoying as we go. This week, Ashley has been focusing on the book tracking function:

You can scan a book and log it as an activity (great for read-alouds and independent reading)

Ashley created a “dummy child” called Library to track her home education book collection

She tags books with keywords (country, geography, history, etc.) so she can quickly see what she already owns

It helps prevent over-buying or borrowing loads from the library when you don’t need to

Kelly’s also using Strew to support a reading challenge with her kids and to look back over time at:

What they’ve read

How their reading level and text complexity is developing

You can download Strew on iOS and Android. https://strew.app/
Use code bighomeed when you subscribe (so it links back to where you found it).

In this episode, we chat about:

Why “Food Around the World” can go in a million directions (and why that’s the magic of it)

Food, travel, culture, and how communities grow/produce food differently

How climate, geography, and environment shape what people eat

How food connects to history (including Roman influences in Britain)

Why this topic can be tricky with neurodivergent / selective eaters — but still totally doable

Food miles, carbon impact, and the surprising footprint of an everyday breakfast

Soil health, farming, and how modern agriculture affects nutrients, rivers, and habitats

Hunger relief, food banks, and how food distribution works behind the scenes

Local economy: where your food money goes (and why local matters)

Listen to find out next weeks topic!

Follow + connect

Instagram + TikTok: @bighomeedpodcast
Website + weekly blog/resources: bighomeedpodcast.com If you’re joining in with our weekly topic challenge, come and tell us what you did — we’d love to hear your ideas and share them with the community.

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By Kelly Rigg & Ashley Vanerio