Food Miles

Increasingly, we buy food from elsewhere even when we could buy British because we have got so used to buying from abroad. Food miles involves an investigation of the distance that foods have travelled. Obviously some foods travel further than others. The RGS GEOGRAPHY IN THE NEWS site offers a list of distances that food may have travelled. The SEASONALITY of food has disappeared from our lives. We demand (and get) any food we want all year round.

The website EAT THE SEASONS encourages people to eat food that is in season. The Alliance for better food and farming has a series of resources at their SUSTAIN WEB website. You could start by identifying foods that can come from both home AND away e.g. cheese (Cheddar from the UK or New Zealand), Vegetables, Lamb (Wales or New Zealand), Bread, Beer etc.

SPANISH FOOD

A lot of our food comes from SPAIN.

Tomatoes are increasingly grown in huge areas of greenhouses in the South of the country.

I am planning a resource related to this area of Southern Spain.

Costa del Polythene...

near Almeria

Here are some links

GUARDIAN ARTICLE: http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/9-20-2005-77196.asp

http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=224788 - GOOGLE MAPS / GOOGLE EARTH PLACEMARK

VISIBLE EARTH ARTICLE: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=16826

Also check out the 100 MILES project. This is a project which tries to get people eating food grown within 100 miles of home..

A good Independent front cover on packaging which is a related issue. For example, I've seen COCONUTS in clingfilm... Do they really need it ? Won't most people recognise what it is ?

Or is there less packaging now in some respects ? I used to work on a fruit and vegetable stall on Mexborough Market in South Yorkshire in the mid 1970s (yes I know I don't look old enough...) and when we unpacked the apples they'd all be individually wrapped in tissue paper, and only a few of them would have stickers on them. They now all need to have stickers so that checkout staff can identify the variety of apple and put in the right code.

Contains some good geographical advice:

Carry a small map of the world around in your back pocket when you go food shopping. You’ll soon know your Bristol from your Brazil and your Thetford from your Thailand!

A new WORD document produced by Anna Moverley (also an illustrated powerpoint which may follow next month when I have some spare bandwidth.)

FOOD MILES (Word document)

Also discovered the FANTASY FARMER game on the FWI site. This is sponsored by a farm planning software company, so there is an option in the game to buy farm planning software. If you choose this option, do you do better in the game ?

A recent discovery is the CLIMATE CHOICES website: FOOD FOR A HEALTHY PLANET

This has some food stories, which are very helpful, but the most useful section perhaps is the FOOD MILES section, which has a number of useful resources: a pie chart (see below), but also a very useful guide and an EXCEL spreadsheet, where you choose from a range of food choices and it calculates the total food miles for your meal. I like this activity.

A useful resource in the Education Guardian in May 2007: "All wrapped up and nowhere to go...."

The Environment Minister: Ben Bradshaw recently urged shoppers to shed their unwanted packaging at the checkout in an attempt to persuade supermarkets to play their part... An EU directive banning excessive packaging is already in place apparently, but there have only been 4 prosecutions. Good article in Guardian G2 earlier this year

It suggests a good starting point is to ask students to list products that they feel are overpackaged. Brainstorm ways of reducing the paper and plastic waste we produce each year. Younger students might watch a video highlighting the amount of excess packaging generated from a single shopping trip.

Create a flow chart after watching the video explaining the environmental aspect.

Drama: Improvise a scene where a customer attempts to make an environmental point at the checkout...

Packaging is also being used as an education tool: the traffic-light labelling initiative.

Another excellent resource is the CARETRACE site. This works with Waitrose, and you need to bring in the details on the label of certain products of the date, and you will be shown where it was produced with a map and details on the farmer(s) involved.

Nice letter in the Guardian on 13/09/07

"I bought a bag of watercress, spinach and rocket salad from Sainsbury's. To find that it was a product of UK, Kenya, Portugal, the US, Italy and Spain came as a bit of a surprise. Can anyone calculate my carbon footprint for this week ?"

Chris Embling, Essex

I'm indebted to Christine Lloyd Staples for sending me a 3 week unit which she had put together. This forms the basis for a unit we teach in Year 8, which has a

1. Why not plan a LONG DISTANCE MEAL. Try to identify 3 or 4 ingredients for a meal, and then find the longest distance possible.

Then plan a home grown meal which has travelled the least distance (or the most...)

2. Using the MEASURING TOOL on Google Earth, you could track all the ingredients to your plate. Why not take a meal such as a PIZZA, or FISH and CHIPS and think about the different ingredients and their likely source. Or the contents of a SHOPPING BASKET which could be mocked up.

3. Do a CONVEYOR BELT with POWERPOINT with motion paths a la Tony Cassidy. Local or not ?

4. Cut out shapes / photos of food items and laminate them - assemble a meal on a paper plate.

Get some paper plates for the department resources from the cash and carry... See my LANDSCAPES BOX page for more on this.

You could also produce some BAR CODES and make a basket, and then SCAN' them...

http://www.youngsseafood.co.uk/ - a very useful interactive site - like the music and the short videos, and the details on the fish fingers and other meals that they produce

New British Library resource on food and the media and the culture of food: FOOD STORIES. Worth exploring...

7. Drama: Improvise a scene where a customer attempts to make an environmental point at the checkout...

Spanish Food	Food Packaging
Useful websites	Food Miles Lessons