5 Ideas for a Green Food Technology Lesson Plan

This is part 3 in our series of articles about making your classroom green. This article is specifically for food technology classes but anyone who eats could potentially make use of this information.

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.