← For Teachers
🌍 Country of the Week · A Spin the Globe Teacher's Guide
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Saint Vincent and the GrenadinesNorth America · This week's dish comes from Kingstown
About Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines calls roasted breadfruit and fried jackfish its national dish. Ground provisions, callaloo, and fresh seafood define a lush, volcanic Eastern Caribbean table.
Breadfruit arrived here on purpose. Captain Bligh brought it from Tahiti to the Saint Vincent Botanical Garden, founded in 1765 and among the oldest in the Western Hemisphere, and the country now recognises more breadfruit cultivar names than anywhere else in the Caribbean, at least thirty-eight recorded.
Roasted breadfruit and fried jackfish is the officially named national dish, and the breadfruit is roasted whole over a fire until the skin blackens, then peeled and sliced. Ground provisions, dasheen, yam, eddoes and green banana, do the work of a starch across the rest of the week, and callaloo and coconut fill in the rest.
The wider picture: A collision of Indigenous, colonial, and immigrant tables.
This week's dish: Duckanoo
Sweet spiced cornmeal and coconut tied in banana leaves and boiled, a West African legacy sweet of Saint Vincent.
Serves 8 · Prep 25 min · Cook 45 min · Difficulty: medium
See the full recipe: ingredients, steps and dietary swaps →
Grown-up jobs: any step that uses a hot stove, oven, boiling water, or a sharp knife is for a teacher or parent. Children can measure, mix, and assemble.
Discussion prompts
1. Find Saint Vincent and the Grenadines on a world map or globe. It sits in North America. Which oceans or neighboring countries does it touch, and roughly how far is it from where you live?
2. Duckanoo comes from Kingstown, in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Read its ingredient list together. Which of those foods do you think are grown or raised nearby, and how might the country's climate and landscape explain that?
3. Read the short story behind Duckanoo. How have the people, trade routes, and history of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines shaped what ends up on the plate there?
4. Compare Duckanoo to a dish your own family cooks. What is similar, what is different, and what one question would you ask a family in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines about how they make and share it?
5. After you cook Duckanoo, add Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to a classroom map and give it a stamp. Write down one fact about its food or geography that you did not know this morning.
🌍 Spin the Globe · Geography through food · spintheglobeofficial.com/for-teachers