Taste of Tomorrow

A very useful series of articles in the BBC Future series. 

Plenty to inform our Year 7 unit 'Food for Thought'.

Fed - Planet Chicken

This podcast is presented by Chris van Tulleken.

It is called 'Planet Chicken', and focusses on the meat we eat the most.... chicken.

Some useful content for our 'Food for Thought' unit in Year 7

"Our food is our history, politics, economics and culture... family, health, happiness - everything we care about depends on food..."

In the series - Radio 4 - he explores the reasons why there are 25 billion chickens alive right now... and we eat 74 billion of them a year. Chickens live only about 35 days if they are broilers...

Warning: a few rude words.

Food for Thought: Burger King

Burger King are exploring the possibilities of vegan and vegetarian alternatives. Could this be one of the alternative to help feed the world in 2050? Year 7 will explore this after Easter.

No-kill lab-grown meat

Available for the first time.

Cultured in bioreactors... 

 

McDonalds Franchise Openings

Watch this and describe the way that McDonalds spread across the globe...

McDonalds Franchise Openings from eric socolofsky on Vimeo.
Since its first franchise opening in Des Plains, Illinois, in 1955, McDonalds has expanded to well over 30,000 locations worldwide. This animation chronicles the spread of McDonalds across the globe.The data used for this animation were taken from mcdonalds.com and mcspotlight.org, and were current up to the year 2000.

Style test executed for D-Fuse @ Eyebeam, 2005. Built with Processing.

Eating Better Alliance

I was made aware of this group via a newspaper column which said that they had worked out that a breakfast sandwich of sausage, bacon and egg has a carbon footprint equal to driving 12 miles. I can't find that particular statistic personally...

The Eating Better Alliance is a group of organisations that is dedicated to improving the food system, and what people eat.



With all organisations of this kind, I always look first for their publications or reports, and whether there is potential for them to become curriculum materials or enquiry questions.

I loved the graphics in the Sandwiches Unwrapped report, plus the wheel of provenance. The triangular sandwiches for up and down trend arrows was a nice touch. The full report is 10 pages long.
This might be a suitable time to remind you of the resource that I wrote on sandwiches as part of the CILT pack of resources that I created.
This is a focus on Pret A Manger.

There's also a report on attitudes to meat consumption.

The full Less and Better report (PDF download)

Food Waste Resources

Check out these Welsh resources from a transition project.

There is a focus on food and food waste.

Revision Pizza

Fast Food Pizza by on Scribd

  Here's some toppings for the pizza....

Fast Food Pizza Toppings v2 by on Scribd

Thanks to Ben Newbury for the inspiration, from his revision pizza...

Print the Pizza to A3 size, and the toppings to A4 and 3 toppings will fit on each pizza slice...

You're welcome :)

Edible Histories (and Geographies)

Thanks to Justin Woolliscroft for the tipoff to this site, which has the stories of some of the things we eat (and drink)

Thy include fish and chips...



The sandwich...


And the curry...


This will go into the list of resources for my 'You are what you eat' topic...

Can eating insects save the world

I have been exploring this idea this week. Stefan was the keynote speaker at the ECOLINT IB Geography conference in Geneva I attended two weeks ago.

Iceland and Palm Oil

The supermarket not the country...

BREAKING NEWS: We're the UK's first supermarket to commit to removing #palmoil from our own label products by the end of this year! Watch here to find out why...#PalmOilAlarmCall pic.twitter.com/hfGvH2QRDW

— Iceland Foods ❄️ (@IcelandFoods) April 10, 2018

Don't waste food...

Sainsbury's have released their new FREE FAB FOOD resources, which are aimed at reducing food waste by introducing students to the idea of an audit, and exploring where savings can be made on a personal and school level.
We explore this issue with Year 7, and these look like a useful addition to our resource bank, as some of the activities are relevant to geography.

We will be looking at FOOD WASTE in the Spring term...

The Story of Fish and Chips

Food and Geography combined...

The life and times of the Strawberry

A good video exploring the life of the strawberry, and the connection with food waste. Thanks to Susan Pike for the lead...

Entomophagy...

Could you do it?
Have you eaten insects?

Could this be a solution to our food supply and food security problems?

World food mapping

Open Evening tomorrow will allow us to connect to the work we do on food geographies.

I went to Asda earlier and purchased a few cheap items of food and drink which had connections with other countries.
When you are looking for a specific range of countries it can be quite hard to find the country of origin. Many items in Asda are labelled as being 'Packed in the UK' but the product in the packet is very likely to have been imported.
Here's the distribution of countries that are connected with the carrier bag of food that I came home with.
These connections are sometimes related to the fact that crops are produced there, or animals are raised and processed there. There are also cultural connections to be made.

Make yours @ BigHugeLabs.com

After the Open Evening is over, most of the items will be going into the Food Bank collection trolley in the school reception. Remember to buy an item from the request list every now and then, and bring it in for the trolley...
One of the items I bought is a jar of NUTELLA, particularly because of this diagram, which shows the global links involved with just this one food item...

Here's a Flickr slideshow of the items too...

Summer post 1: The Environmental impact of your Hamburger

Ready for the new You are what you Eat unit next year...
Can you research other foods ?

by bsehenuk.

Food - Year 7 Exam

The Year 7 exam is on the theme of FOOD.
This is summed up in the diagram below.

Everything we've done on food relates to:

a) Bananas  - supply chain / Foncho and Fairtrade

b) Cocoa - food miles / imports etc.

c) Burger - health and malnutrition

d) Egg - animal welfare / intensive battery farms / organic

e) Fish - fish stocks in the oceans, sustainability

Some notes will be with you at the end of the week...

What does the world eat for breakfast ?

How accurate do you think this is ?
Can you really sum up what a country has for breakfast ?
Does everyone in your group all eat the same ?

Should it be on the menu ?

An interesting article from Jay Rayner from the weekend's papers will be hitting Year 7 classrooms next week.
I have a copy of Jay's book on food, and this article is apparently a new chapter... and very much in keeping with the rest of the book.

It describes the background to the launch, by Pizza Hut of a huge pizza which contains ten cheeseburgers in its crust. The pizza contains more calories than the recommended daily intake for an adult, and also large amounts of fat. I would imagine this is not intended to be eaten by one person... though it might be...

We will explore the issues that Jay touches on in the article.
These include Food security, food miles, food waste, the role of supermarkets and the impact of our diets on health and obesity, including the rapid growth of type-2 diabetes cases in China, for example.
Should this Pizza be on the menu ?
You can help decide...

Should it or shouldn’t it be on the menu by GeoBlogs