We find food education at the Wenzhou Student Practical School. The school¡¯s motto is "cultivate virtue, inspire wisdom, educate through practice." Ou (short name for Wenzhou) Cuisine cooking is one of its core courses ¡ª alongside woodblock printing, clay modelling and net weaving. Students cook in kitchens, graded on both their techniques and final dishes. The school sets to introduce VR-based training and a digital platform to build a "smarter" on?campus training facility. In May 2026, it launched the city¡¯s first spring-break study programme: including some 30 courses across intangible heritage, labour, science and national defence, drawing 820 high schoolers on opening day alone. The school is part of a broader network that, according to the Wenzhou Education Bureau, boasts 204 city-level training facilities, 105 training projects, and 1.66 million student visits in a single year.
We find food education on the coast. In October 2025, the Dongtou District Student Practical School invited four women ¡ª locally called "fishing family cooks" ¡ª into a campus home-economics room. Twenty-three stoves lit, the women, wearing aprons, stood among the students as their "exclusive mentors." Children in the lower grades learned to make a ¡°four-dish, one-soup, one-platter¡± meal from scratch ¡ª washing, cutting, cooking and plating in teams. One team built a platter called "Fishing Island Scenery," using laver and shrimp to mimic waves and boats, with the words "united as one" cut into the shape of a reef. In another workshop, a cook surnamed Zheng taught students to make a flatbread from a local seaweed called yangxicai (sargassum) ¡ª from the water-to-ingredient proportion to how firmly to knead. A student named Lin said he had made egg-fried rice and tomato-and-egg soup, and that the experience had taught him "every grain of rice is hard-won." Another student, Ye Jiaqi, said she had not known yangxicai could be cooked that way. The school¡¯s principal, Ye Mingshou, said the next class would teach students how to cook "two sea vegetables and one fish (sargassum, laver and yellow croakers), Dongtou District¡¯s iconic seafood specialty."
We find food education at produce markets. In February 2025, "Modern Basket" ¡ª state-owned market chain operating ten standardised smart produce markets across Wenzhou ¡ª partnered with Nanpu Experimental Middle School. Students arrived as online-order fillers: receiving orders, collecting goods from stalls, checking, packing and handing them to delivery riders. Then they became food-safety inspectors, taking random samples of produce and running simple qualitative tests. The final task was called "Family Kitchen Manager." Each student designed a four-dish, one-soup menu, bought the ingredients at the market, and prepared the meal for their family. The market chain has over 3,000 square metres of practice space and has built its own local curriculum in cooking, crafts, planting and intangible cultural heritage, tied to traditional solar terms and Wenzhou¡¯s food customs.
What connects these three education methods is not a shared curriculum, but an idea: children cannot understand what their city eats simply by reading about it. They have to touch the ingredients, stand next to someone who cooks, and make the food themselves ¡ª whether that teacher is a certified educator, a fishing family cook, or the market itself.