Global Picture
The foods we eat come from all over the world. Things like bananas, chocolate, and coffee are common in every American household, but they have to travel thousands of miles to get to the local grocery store. The farther the food has to travel, the more fuel it takes to get it there. The more fuel it takes to get it there, the more pollution and global warming it creates.
Big Planet, Little Land
The planet Earth is very large, but there's really not that much space on it for farming, which means it's important to protect the soil on the farmland. You can demonstrate how very little farmland there is by cutting up an apple for the class. The apple represents the planet Earth.
Cut the apple into quarters; three of those are oceans.
Slice the remaining quarter in half; one piece is all of the land people cannot live on, such as swamps, mountaintops, polar ice caps, and deserts. What's left now? One-eighth of the apple.
Slice this piece into four equal sections. Three of them represent the land that is too rocky, too wet, too cold, or too steep. It also includes land with soil that is too poor to grow food on and all the land that has been built on or paved. What's left now? One-thirty-second of the planet.
Carefully peel the tiny slice of Earth. This tiny bit of peel represents the very thin layer of the Earth's crust that grows all the food to feed everyone on the planet. This layer, called the topsoil, is less than five feet deep and it takes 100 years for nature to create one inch of it.
This visual example usually sparks some lively class discussion. Did you have any idea that people had such little space for farming? How can people protect the soil? Can the students practice cutting an apple (or drawing an apple and then drawing lines through it to represent the cuts) and telling the story to someone else?
The average fruit or vegetable has to travel 1,650 miles from the farm to your table. It's a long journey and causes a lot of pollution. Map it for the class and calculate how many gallons of gas it would take if you took the same road trip.
Play with Your Food
Have fun with food by having your students create food puppets and write a play that can teach younger students. Divide the classroom into pairs or small groups. Assign each of them a simple food like a potato, banana, kiwi, mango, cinnamon, or cocoa bean. Find common foods that may come from far away. Each group will need to make a puppet of their food and answer the following questions:
Where is this food from?
How many miles is that from where you live?
How many gallons of gas would it take to get here by car if your car gets thirty miles per gallon?
How many pounds of the global-warming gas, carbon dioxide, would be released by this trip if each gallon of gas releases about twenty-five pounds of carbon dioxide?
What language do they speak where this food came from?
How is this food grown and farmed?
Once the students have learned all about their food, they should write a script as though their food is talking and introducing itself to an audience. Have fun with it and let the kids write music for the play and design the set. Encourage them to use their imaginations.
