As health threats appear with increasing regularity in our food systems and other food crises loom worldwide, we look to rural areas to provide local and nutritious foods. Educationally, we seek approaches to food studies that engage students and their communities and, ultimately, lead to positive action. Yet food studies receive only generic coverage and tangential attention within existing curricula. This article, reporting a pilot study located at Canada's geographic and cultural edge, focuses on local knowledge about past and present food practices. Objectives are to test pedagogies that bring all students greater opportunities for engagement and learning about their physical environment and food history, and that can be applied to rural and, with modifications, urban settings. Three critical, place-base pedagogical approaches — experiential, discovery and arts-based — to classroom teaching and learning are discussed, as well as implications for educational leadership, teacher training and curriculum development.

Many environmental educators were motivated to enter the feld by a concern for the loss of places to which they felt a strong sense of attachment and belonging. This raises the question of whether a sense of place, or attachment to the Australian biophysical or cultural landscape, has shaped Australian environmental education research. An analysis was conducted of articles by Australian authors published in the AJEE in the period from 1990–2000, a time that preceded the (re)emergence of attention to place-based education in academic circles. Only four of 67 articles addressed the author's or other Australian's sense of place. Several explanations for this fnding are examined, drawing on some of the environmental psychology literature on place identity as well as the notion that sense of place involves multiple interrelated personal, cultural and professional identities. Finally, an argument is made as to why place attachments are important to environmental education research.