I never thought I would ever be home schooling Noam and yet here we are. And our first day's lesson? Doritos. I don't know how the idea came to me but I thought there must be some way to engage Noam in school and learning and if Doritos couldn't do it then I wasn't sure what could. So we headed out to the store at 9:03 on Friday morning on our first day of home school, on our first field trip. We talked a bit before we left about how much the Doritos would cost and where Noam thought the money would go. We talked about where the store owner got the Doritos from and how much Noam thought he might have paid for them. I asked Noam what he thought the Doritos were made from and he had no idea. So we set off to try and answer some of these questions. In the end we found out that Doritos are made primarily of corn. And we found out that a lot of things are made from corn. Gasoline is made from corn. Most of our sugar is made from corn. All sorts of stuff. We talked about the difference between revenue and profit (money being another of Noam's favourite subjects). We talked about food distributors and farmers. We talked about middle men and how each level along the way gets paid. We talked about cost of goods. But mostly we talked about corn. Noam seemed amazed at all the things in our cupboards that had corn in them. For his homework Noam had to find 10 things that had corn ingredients. He had to find three things with MSG and he had to keep a food diary for 24 hours, recording everything he ate.