Cooking Your Way Around the World: How eat2explore Is Turning Picky Eaters into Global Citizens

There is a moment that happens in kitchens across the country when a child who once refused anything unfamiliar leans over a pot of something fragrant and new and asks, “What country is this from?” That moment, small as it sounds, is exactly what Rowena Scherer had in mind when she founded eat2explore.

Rowena grew up in Malaysia, where Sunday mornings meant cooking alongside her mother, a ritual that stayed with her long after she left home. She went on to study in New Zealand, built a career on Wall Street, and lived and worked in cities around the world. Everywhere she landed, food was her compass. It told her where she was, who the people were, and what mattered to them. When she eventually settled in New York, got married, and started a family, she traded finance for culinary school, choosing characteristically to start with the hardest tradition she could find. She trained at the French Culinary Institute.

Years later, watching her own children grow, she began thinking about what she most wanted to give them. Not just recipes, but the confidence that comes from knowing the world feels navigable. From that impulse, eat2explore was born in 2017.

The concept is elegant in its simplicity. Families subscribe to a monthly kit built around a single country. Each box contains three recipes, all the essential spices and sauce mixes needed to make them - sourced specifically because many are hard to find in a typical grocery store - a beautifully designed sixteen-page booklet covering the country’s geography, history, food culture, and art, along with a curated music playlist, film recommendations, and a reading list. A kid-friendly cooking tool and a craft activity - like painting the country’s flag - round out the experience. Everything is sized for a family of four to six, so there is plenty for everyone at the table. Downloadable lesson plans are also available, supporting both independent and guided learning, and for school programs that do not permit consumable materials, non-food versions of the kits are offered as well.

The program is designed from the ground up for hands-on, screen-free learning. Children are not watching someone cook; they are cooking. That distinction matters enormously, both for engagement and for the kind of deep cultural understanding that comes only from doing something with your hands.

So far, 24 countries are available, spanning South Korea, Japan, Greece, France, Italy, Lebanon, Ukraine, Peru, Brazil, Kenya, Ethiopia, Morocco, and more. Australia is being added this year, developed in partnership with working chefs from the country and Tourism Australia to ensure authenticity. That commitment to getting it right is something Rowena takes seriously. Though she is a trained chef herself, she collaborates with culinary professionals from each country represented in the collection, because the goal has always been genuine cultural immersion, not approximation.

eat2explore has received widespread recognition since its launch, earning award-winning status as an educational cooking kit and gaining a devoted following among homeschooling families across the United States, many of whom receive funding support from their states to use the program. Rowena has also extended the concept into a published cookbook. A Taste of the World: Celebrating Global Flavors, published in 2024 and featured in the New York Times, offers sixty-four kid-friendly recipes from twenty countries, complete with full-color photographs, illustrated cultural facts, and step-by-step instructions designed for families to cook together. The book is available through Simon & Schuster and wherever books are sold.

For parents of picky eaters (and most of us have been there!) Rowena offers a perspective worth holding onto. “Your mouth is like a muscle,” she says. “It has to be practiced.” The point is not to expect an overnight transformation, but to introduce children gradually to new flavors, new spices, new textures. The key is engagement. When children help choose the country, go grocery shopping for the ingredients, stir the pot, roll the meatballs, and plate the food, they are invested in the outcome. They want to taste what they made. A child who might push away an unfamiliar dish at a restaurant will often eat that same dish enthusiastically if their own hands helped prepare it.

The fit with Montessori families is a natural one. eat2explore is built around hands-on learning, cultural curiosity, practical life skills, and the kind of rich, interdisciplinary engagement that Montessori educators have always valued. The curriculum woven into each kit spans geography, history, language, the arts, and social studies - exactly the cross-curricular depth that characterizes good Montessori practice. Children as young as 4 can participate meaningfully by stirring, coating and rolling, while older children and teenagers take on more complex tasks. The kitchen becomes a classroom without anyone calling it that.

Rowena’s own children are now young adults. They have traveled and worked abroad since they were 16, comfortable in unfamiliar places because those places never felt entirely foreign. They grew up knowing about the world through its food, its music, its stories. That ease in the world, that confidence, is, she believes, one of the deepest gifts cooking together gave them.

eat2explore kits can be ordered as individual country selections or through a monthly subscription, which Rowena recommends both for the discount and for the element of surprise children love. Parents receive advance notice of the upcoming country along with a shopping list, so there is time to prepare. With twenty-four countries and more on the way, a subscription keeps a family exploring for two years and counting.

Montessori families interested in learning more can visit eat2explore.com. Whether it becomes a Saturday afternoon tradition or a rainy weeknight adventure, the invitation is the same: pull out a cutting board, put on a playlist, and let dinner take your family somewhere new.