How can food choices effect the environment?

Many students might be largely unaware of how the food industry effects the environment, so it’s good to start the lesson by asking them that question. Here are the types of answers you should be looking for, which we’ll go over in a moment:

• Local vs international ingredients and green house gas emissions
• Farming methods — does the farming cause deforestation for example?
• Organic vs chemical fertilizer and pesticide usage
• Genetically modified vs non-GM crops
• How is the food packaged — is it wasteful?
• Disposing of food waste correctly — compost heaps, disposal of fats and oils, etc

These are some good topic areas to get started. Your students may also think of some others, such as cattle and atmospheric methane levels.

Asking this question will give you a good indication of how clueless/clued-up your students are.

1. Where do the ingredients come from?

Most students will have some understanding of how transportation has an impact on the environment. Ask your students to name a few of their favourite foods. Draw a few of them on the white board and annotate them, with the students help, showing roughly what each of those ingredients is costing in greenhouse gas emissions due to it’s location.

You could make an activity of this by borrowing some atlases from the geography department and asking your students to work out the approximate carbon footprint of there favourite snack or meal.

You may like to make a point of the fact that buying local/seasonal food reduces greenhouse gas emissions, stimulates the local economy and may be more healthy.

2. Farming methods

In the past Brazilian beef was often used to illustrate the problem of deforestation in order to produce farmable land, but palm oil will have a lot more recent news stories associated with it. Perhaps during this part of the lesson you could ask your students to identify products that contain palm oil, then ask them to try to find a more eco-friendly alternative that they could use to produce the same foods, without such a high cost to the environment.

3. Why organic food is better

Now it’s time to examine the effect fertilizers and pesticides have on the environment. This may be something that gets covered in Geography more so than in food technology so you might like to keep this part of the lesson brief. Topics you might like to mention would include:

• Eutrophication — how fertilizers flowing into rivers damages local eco-systems
• Soil nutrient depletion — how non-organic foods contain less nutrients and reduce the quality of the soil
• How pesticides effect the food chain

4. How food packaging effects the environment

This one is very easy to understand. For this part of the lesson you might like to bring in some examples. If so you’ll want:

• A product that is packaged in recyclable materials
• A product that is packaged in non-recyclable materials
• A product that’s packaging is wasteful — ask students why this is so
• A product that’s packaged well — ask students why this is so

At this point you might like to play students a TV news clip about the recent developments supermarket chains are making in milk bottle packaging. Do a search on Google — Asda plan to bring out a cardboard milk bottle and there is talk of ‘milk bags’ from Waitrose. Both example show businesses competitive interest in the importance of sustainable packaging, which is good when you consider the high rate of turnover of milk bottles.

If you have time you might like to show students good ways to package their packed lunches. Emphasize the re-using and recycling of packaging as important factors.

5. Disposing of food waste correctly

By using a natural ‘activator’, containing friendly bacteria, you can compost almost any food waste. Check out this kitchen composter for an example. So you can avoid throwing waste food in the bin by composting instead.

Disposing of oil and fat from fried food

Instead of pouring used oil and fat down the sink you should allow it to dry and dispose of it in the bin. By pouring it down the sink it impairs the water purification system.

The lessons main activity

If you’ve got a double period, it would be good to spend the first period teaching your students how to be green with food preparation, ingredients choices, packages, and waste. In the second period you might like to ask your students to make their own packed lunch, making sure to strictly abide by the green guidelines they have just learnt about.

So they need to make a lunch that is:

• made from locally sourced ingredients
• is preferably organic, or as much as possible
• contains no ingredients that cause deforestation or destruction of habitats
• is packaged using sustainable/recyclable/re-usable materials
• and is prepared in an eco-friendly manner

Once they understand how to do this and can put it into practice, with any luck they can take away some of these good practices and tell their parents how important they are!

Other things you might like to discuss

• How can home delivery reduce greenhouse gas emissions?
• Is heating greenhouses in the UK more environmentally friendly than shipping crops from warmer climates?
• Why processed food is more wasteful in terms of transportation associated impacts
• Foods you can grow at home
• Seasonal foods for your region of the world

Have you taught a green food tech lesson?

If you have any thoughts or ideas you’d like to share please post a comment below.

Livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, reports the FAO. This includes 9 percent of all CO2 emissions, 37 percent of methane, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide. Altogether, that’s more than the emissions caused by transportation.

Source: csmonitor.com

Components of your typical envelope:

*Not in most cases, although there are exceptions. Ask your local authority to find out if they take glue covered paper. While you’re at it ask them if the paper recycling takes that shiny paper, so you’ll know if you can recycle junk mail envelopes.

**For more information on recycling stamps check out the recyclenow website, which also has lots more great information on things you can and can’t recycle.

How to recycle your envelopes

Remove the see-through plastic address window and the glue covered seal. Use them to build a statue of yourself in the office or model cars using the see through plastic for windows and the glued seals for fixings and structure. Recycle the rest in the paper recycling.

Other suggestions for your envelopes

• Shopping lists — you may be able to use the sticky part to stick them to your fridge
• Re-use the ones with plastic windows (if you carefully open them)
• Put them under the short leg of a wonky table
• Use them for the storage/categorization of small things like newspaper clippings
• Start a flip book cartoon using one envelope a day

100% recyclable envelopes

You might prefer to save the statue making and cartoon drawing to the professionals. However, unless you have 100% recyclable envelopes it can be just as time consuming to recycle the envelopes.

There are some envelopes available that use a corn-based film for the address window, which dissolves in water, but these are few and far between.

If you’re sending mail that does not require a see through plastic address window there are 100% recyclable envelopes available (from us), which are also compostable and biodegradable.

How do you re-use your envelopes?

Model paper sail boats? To-do lists? Let us know in your comments.

Do your students consider the environment when they make decisions? Is sustainability part of their repertoire when working on projects?

Every action has a consequence. If you can make sure the ‘eco-factor’ is present in your students decision making processes, it will not only make them greener, it will make them more pragmatic well rounded decision makers - something they can apply to more than just green issues.

What is the eco-factor?

What impact does what I’m doing have on the environment? That’s the eco-factor in any decision. This question can be applied to almost anything. It’s another card in your student’s hand, whether it is applied to debating, marketing, design, food technology, architecture, IT or even PE.

Careers revolving around or involving sustainability issues and other green issues are in growth and will remain in growth. Ingraining the eco-factor in your students understanding of a wide variety of topics is not only common sense; it may give them an edge.

Students need to understand that the environment should be an element of almost any decision they make, with regard to work and lifestyle habits, whether the decision be what they eat for lunch or what materials to use in their technology project.

Using visual consequences to educate your students to be eco-friendly

Children (and many adults) may not take much notice of the fact that every action has a consequence somewhere down the line, out of sight. Therefore you may need to help associate specific consequences with actions. For example, when one of your students throws a piece of plastic packaging in the bin, ask them, “where do you think that plastic will go?” See what they say. If they don’t understand why they need to recycle plastics they won’t do it, so you need to educate them.

Often, posters and media images aimed at encouraging us to reduce our impact on the environment focus on facts and figures, while ignoring underlying reasoning. Kids are fast learners and they can get enthusiastic about something if it is interesting and has a high impact on the world AND they feel they can get involved in making change.

The little things make a lot of difference

What did you have for lunch today? It’s a simple question. But most people wouldn’t think about where the ingredients for their lunch came from. Were they from the nearest farm, or were they shipped from a thousand miles away? Did their farming cause massive deforestation? Would your students understand the impact shipping goods overseas has on greenhouse gas emissions?

How do you make sure your students are using the ‘eco-factor’?

If you teach classes regularly, hopefully you’ve already got some good ideas. Or maybe you’ve just thought up a great way of ingraining green in your students. Either way we’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas. Comments are open…

You wouldn’t have to if you used a washable mug.

According to the environmental protection agency over 25 BILLION styrofoam cups are thrown away a year*. It’s understandable using a styrofoam or cardboard cup if your out and about, but if you’re in the office or at school it’s easy enough to carry a mug to the machine.

*Source: The throwaway generation: 25 billion Sytrofoam cups a year.