Food and Agriculture Systems (10 minutes -
Review)
Begin this lesson by discussing food and
agriculture systems. You can couple this with a U. S.
History lesson set during a colonial or revolutionary time
period. Ask students to talk about how food was grown and
distributed before cars, trucks or modern transportation
infrastructures.
Most of the food in the early 17th
and 18th century was grown locally because of a lack of
refrigeration and poor road conditions. However, as the
industrial revolution kicked into high gear, and farming
technologies spread - foodstuffs were grown farther
away from the people who would consume and eat them.
Now, most Americans' food travels over 1, 500 miles
from the farm to the table. Additionally, most of the food
products we use everyday are produced on large industrial
farms and then distributed by multinational corporations to
supermarkets, schools, hospitals and prisons across the
country. For instance, the majority of the
foods found in your cafeteria, have been pre-cooked and
frozen so that these products can be transported long
distances without spoiling and are easy and quick to
prepare in kitchens that must feed thousands of
students like you every day!
Make a timeline with
your students looking at the way food was produced and
distributed historically in the 13 colonies and the
immediate post-Revolutionary War era. What are the major
differences we can observe today? Why was food production
more local in the 1600 and 1700s?
Your Role in the
System (10 minutes - Investigate)
So how does
the food distribution system work anyway? How exactly
does food get from a farm to your table? Let’ s look
at the design process of the modern food system:
1.
Growing - This first step happens on a farm,
in a garden, or even in the ocean if it is a fish farm.
This is the step where your food is grown.
2.
Transporting - This is the point where food is divided up
and delivered many places. Whole foods from a farm can be
delivered to grocery stores, restaurants, farmers markets,
and even factories. How it is transported can also vary
greatly - from a person on foot to a refrigerated
truck, from a cargo ship, to a jet.
3.
Changing/Processing- Food is changed to make another
product. Sometimes it is changed to alter the flavor or to
make it last longer, or to make new foods altogether.
Processing can include things like canning, freezing,
heating, drying, adding preservatives to food or removing
fat (low-fat).
4. Packaging - This is a
method of protecting food from spoilage on its way to
markets and grocery stores. It divides up goods into equal
quantities, and provides a place for advertising. Some
materials used for packaging are paper, plastic, cardboard,
glass, and aluminum.
5. Buying - At
this point food producers and companies determine what
consumers want or need. Sometimes the marketers make you
think you need something so you will buy it. They decide
how to make people want to buy a kind of food. (Example:
the cartoon characters from cereal boxes were created to
catch children’ s’ eyes. ) A big portion of the
money you pay for a product goes to the marketing costs.
Over $10 billion a year is spent advertising food and
beverage items to children and teens. The second aspect of
“ Buying” is where the consumer gets the
product. Food can be sold in a variety of places, from
grocery stores or restaurants to farmers markets and CSAs.
6. Preparing/Cooking - Cooking can
happen at home, restaurants, or in lunchrooms like in a
school or hospital. You can cook “ from
scratch” or you can buy a frozen meal and heat it in
the microwave. When we eat at a restaurant or lunchroom,
someone else does the cooking. Many times, buying “
heater meals” means there was more that happened to
food in the “ Processing” step, than when a
meal is made to eat immediately.
7.
Consuming/Eating - This is the step where we finally
eat the food.
8. Disposing or Reusing -
Finally, food scraps and food packaging left over after a
meal can have a couple of potential fates: Recycling:
Leftover food can be used to make compost, a rich organic
fertilizer to add to a garden or farm. The food ends up
where it started. Packaging such as paper, cardboard,
aluminum and glass can be recycled. Disposing: Throwing
away food scraps and/or packaging. Waste is taken to a
landfill, or dump where it is compacted and covered with
layers of soil.
After talking about how food gets from the
farm to your table, investigate some of the environmental
and health problems associated with this kind of food
production.
- Food production and delivery
require a great deal of fossil fuels
- Soil,
water, and air pollution. In the Midwest, the Mississippi
River often floods. Runoff from fertilizer makes the water
toxic not only near the flood area but for everything
downstream from it.
- Soil erosion and depletion.
- Elimination of beneficial microorganisms in
soil. Loss of wildlife on the farm.
- Insects and
bacteria develop resistance to pesticides, creating “
super pests” .
- Processed foods have less
nutrition and more chemicals than whole foods,
- Loss
of plant and animal diversity.
| Environmental Issue | Environmental
Impact | Health Impact |
| Water Quality | |
|
| Air Quality | | |
|
Pesticide/Insecticide/Herbicide Use | | |
|
Animal Waste Management | | |
Map it Out (20
minutes - Frame/ReFrame)
Introduce the concept of
food mapping to your students. As a warm-up activity make
the connection between food, student’ s bodies and
the relationships between the environment and our health
more central by asking each student to think critically
about their connections to food.
Making Connections:
Food Systems and Your Body
Start by having each
student create a food log of the past week or day. What did
you eat for breakfast, how about last night for dinner?
Discuss as a class what kinds of foods are being consumed.
If patterns begin to emerge, begin to write these on the
board.
Now break out the kinds of foods being
consumed into categories like meat, produce, vegetables and
grains. What is the general breakdown? Does this breakdown
represent the USDA’ s food pyramid accurately?
https://www. mypyramid. gov/ The USDA food
pyramid, redesigned in 2009, is an easily understandable
tool for directing the food choices we make every day.
Finally, lets begin to trace this food system backwards.
Ask students to create a food map that starts with their
body and what they ate most recently. Visually map out each
kind of food and ask students to think about the places
that this food may have been grown. Fruits for example will
most likely be grown in a warm climate, grains maybe come
from the Midwest and vegetables from various regions around
the country and globe.
Encourage students to make
connections about what they are eating each day and where
it is coming from through this mapping process. Have each
student switch with a partner or other student. Ask each
student to explain his or her food map to a partner. Follow
up with questions about their personal relationships to
food in terms of health and the environment. For instance
this can be an opportunity to bring up fast food chains in
the area that students may visit, processed foods that are
popular and environmentally related issues that address
water quality and land-use issues in the region.
Now
engage your students in a larger scale food mapping
activity. Divide students into design teams of 4-5 and pass
out world maps. Each design team will be given 5 food
products with their country origin to map.
Use a ruler and
the map's sca; e found in the legend or key, each
team must approximate the number of miles their foods
traveled to get to their school.
| Yogurt
Ohio | Lettuce California | Garlic
China | Oranges Arizona |
| Bread
Kentucky | Avocado Egypt | Asparagus
Peru | Peaches Mexico |
| Chicken
Louisiana | Hamburger New Zealand |
Crab Thailand | Watermelon Texas |
|
Bananas Ecuador | Cheese Australia |
Pineapple Hawaii | Cookie Virginia |
|
Box of Cereal Tennessee | Onion
Guatemala | Potatoes Idaho | Ice Cream
Wisconsin |
Using the table, assign each student 2-3
foods to map. Handout a world map to each student. Using a
ruler and measure the distance between two points: the
location of your town/city and the general area of where
the food is located. Identify the scale on each map and ask
students to approximate the distance traveled using the
ratio prompted through the scale.
Once the foods
have been mapped - have each team create
representative diagrams of this food system. Create a
starting point for origin and an end point for consumption.
Each team or student should attempt to map out the 8 steps
discussed previously.
Technology Extension:
• Map Number 41 Fruit
Exports
• Map Number 42 Fruit Imports
• Map Number 43 Vegetables Exports
• Map
Number 44 Vegetables Imports
• Map Number 45
Dairy Exports
• Map Number 46 Dairy
Imports
• Map Number 47 Cereals Exports
• Map Number 48 Cereals Imports
• Map
Number 49 Meat Exports
• Map Number 50 Meat
Imports
• Map Number 51 Fish Exports
• Map Number 52 Fish Imports
• Map Number
53 Groceries Exports
• Map Number 54 Groceries
Imports
• Map Number 55 Alcohol And Cigarettes
Exports
• Map Number 56 Alcohol And Cigarettes
Imports
• Map Number 177 Undernourishment in
1990
• Map Number 178 Undernourishment in
2000
• Map Number 182 Underweight
Children
• Map Number 363 International Food
Aid
• Map Number 364 International Fast
Food
Ask each student to write down their reactions
to the map they have chosen. How does it differ from an
untouched world map? What regions of the world are bigger
or smaller? What does this tell us about the topic being
explored?
Mapping Solutions (20 minutes -
Generate)
In the next session, talk to students about
possible solutions that could decrease the number of food
miles traveled and help to alleviate some local and global
environmental impacts.
- Organic local farms
- Many organic farms are creating sustainable and
local food sources for urban and suburban communities
isolated from agricultural lands.
- Local Purchasing
- Many restaurants and cafes choose to purchase only
local ingredients in their stores.
- Community
Supported Agriculture (CSA) - A cooperative system where
interested consumers purchase a share (aka a "membership"
or a "subscription") with a local farm. In return members
receive seasonal produce each week throughout the farming
season.
- Farmers market - Farmers markets are
marketplaces for local produce and products. Farmers setup
a stand once a week in a downtown location to access
diverse populations
- School/Home Gardening
- one of the simplest ways to make your food more
local is to grow it yourself. If you have a backyard or
even a windowsill you can begin to grow your own herbs,
food crops and more.
One you’ ve discussed some
solutions, encourage students to design a more local or
sustainable food system for the school or local community.
Using the same design teams you had for the food mapping
activity - challenge each team to come up with a way
to reduce the miles their food travels. Teams should list
food products they commonly consume and develop ideas for
maps that show the reduced amount of distribution or
transportation required.
Encourage bioregional
thinking - what kinds of food products are local to
the region and what seasons correspond to the appropriate
food crop.
Math Connection: Calculating your
Foodprint
Ask student’ s to answer 2
questions to the best of their ability to estimate their
carbon footprint related to food. To arrive at your food
footprint, the quiz sums up arable land, pasture, sea
space, and land areas to sequester CO2 from the energy
expended to grow, process and transport the items. (Note
this is an estimate and not accurate)
Question 1: How
often do you eat animal-based foods (beef, pork, chicken,
fish, eggs, dairy products)?
(A) Never (vegan)
(B) Infrequently/strict vegetarian (no meat and eggs/dairy
a few times a week)
(C) Occasionally (no meat or
occasional meat, but eggs/dairy almost daily)
(D)
Often (meat once or twice a week)
(E) Very often
(meat daily)
(F) Almost always (meat and eggs/dairy
in almost every meal)
Circle the number your answer
corresponds to:
(a) 0. 46
(b) 0. 59
(c) 0.
73
(d) 0. 86
(e) 1. 00
(f) 1. 14
Question 2: Locally Grown Food: How much of your food is
processed, packaged, and not locally grown (from more than
200 miles away)?
(A) Most of the food I eat is
processed, packaged, and from far away.
(B) Three
Quarters
(C) Half
(D) One quarter
(E)
Very little. Most of the food I eat is unprocessed,
unpackaged, and locally grown
Circle the number your
answer corresponds to:
(a) 1. 10
(b) 1. 00
(c) 0.
90
(d) 0. 79
(e) 0. 69
Your Food Footprint:
Q1 ______ x Q2 _____ x 5. 5 = ______ acres.
(Multiply your answer to Question 1 by your answer to
Question 2 by 5. 5. )
The average US Ecological
Footprint is 24 acres per person. The average food
footprint is 6 acres.
Poster Design (10 minutes - Edit and
Develop)
After each team has brainstormed, groups
should design a poster that explains their newly designed
local food system.
Require that each team
include:
1. System Factors - climate,
region
2. Environmental Impacts - how
does this new system reduce environmental impacts
3.
System Elements - what makes your new food
system local?
4. Food Mile Reduction -
how many miles are now reduced on average because of the
new system?
After developing your new food systems,
present ideas to the class. If computer access is available
challenge each student to enter their maps using an online
resource called SourceMap (
www. sourcemap. org ), which provides
user-generated maps of where things come from and where
they end up.
Finally, discuss how each system thought about
local ecology and the role of consumers and farmers. (Share
and Evaluate)
If time allows, present to other
members of the school and discuss options in creating a
farm- to school program in your school. (finalize)