Life Story of My Lunch
This activity is adapted from the Learning for a Sustainable Future (LSF) “Food for Thought”, which helps students understand food—where our food comes from, how our global food system impacts our planet and our health, the concept of “food miles”, how plants grow and what they need, and how to grow their own food. For more curriculum-connected, teacher-reviewed activities, visit Learning for a Sustainable Future’s “Resources for Rethinking” database at www.R4R.ca.
Grades: 7-8
Time: 30 minutes
Learning Outcomes:
Students will investigate the processes and products that go into producing food from a systems perspective.
Description:
Students will work in small groups brainstorming the processes and products that go into a common lunch item.
Materials:
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Markers
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Internet Access
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- Students are asked to create a mindmap to depict their understanding of the issues related to the food they eat.
- Ask each student to choose the ‘entrée’ from their lunch. The students should draw that item in the centre of their Post-it® Easel Pad page, leaving lots of room for writing/pictures around it.
- Each student should consider how that food item came to be and how it got from its natural state to their lunch. Ask students to draw pictures on their papers that depict that process (encourage them to consider ingredients, transportation, packaging and marketing). Students may wish to use colour coding.
- For all of the steps in the process, encourage students to include the advantages and disadvantages for: plants, animals, humans nearby, humans far away, the planet, etc. Encourage students to look for interconnections among the concepts.
- After the posters have been assessed, ask students to display their posters by sticking them on the walls. Have all of the students do a gallery tour with the challenge that they must search for 3 new ideas to add to their own poster (in a distinctive colour).
- After the tour, as a class, generate a list of observations about the posters. Write the observations simply but descriptively on a list on the board. For example: many foods had ingredients that are made by humans; many foods had lots of packaging; many foods travelled a great distance to get here; many foods were grown with pesticides; some foods were grown without pesticides (if they have an organic label); etc.
Follow up:
For more curriculum-connected, teacher-reviewed activities, visit Learning for a Sustainable Future’s “Resources for Rethinking” database at www.R4R.ca.
