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Healthy and Sustainable Food

Exploring Food: Dependance and Impacts on the Environment

This curriculum unit aims to begin cultivating food literacy among middle school and upper elementary students. By the end of the unit, students should be able to explain how food supply chains or food systems depend on and impact the natural environment and understand the following:

    • The food we eat reaches us via food supply chains through which food moves systematically in domino-like motion from producers to consumers while the money consumers pay for food goes to people who work at various stages along the food supply chain in the reverse direction.
    • Natural, human and man-made resources are required at each step of the supply chain.
    • The resources required at each process along the food supply chain depend on and impact the natural environment.
    • Eating food that has low impact on the environment is important, but often difficult depending on where people live and how much income they earn.

Exploring Food: Download by Lesson

Cover

Acknowledgements

Introduction & Understanding Goals

Lesson 1: Where Does Our Food Come From?

Lesson 2: Where Does Our Food Come From?
Expoloring the Case of Chocolate

Lesson 3: Where Does Our Food Come From?
Exploring Our Meals

Lesson 4: What is the Food Supply Chain?

Lesson 5: Taking Stock & How Do Food Supply Chains Dependon the Environment?
Exploring the Case of Chocolate

Lesson 6: How Do Our Meals Impact the Environment?
The Case of Hamburgers from Fast Food Chains

Lesson 7: How Can We Eat in Ways that Reduce Our Environmental Impact?

Summative Lesson

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