Energy, Climate, Environment

Lesson 1"Food, From Seed to Stink-Place"

Objective 1:

To create an atmosphere where students learn about how the foods they consume involves energy; and how energy impacts the environment in a repeating cycle.

Objective 2:

• -	Students use math to calculate distances and about how much gas it takes to get from one place to another, home to store, store to home, school to home
  1.	Using either Yahoo Maps or Google to map the school location to a grocery store within 5 to 10 miles, and estimate how much gas would be used in traveling that distance.
  2.	Have students choose three foods from Food Chart and chart how much energy is involved in getting the food to the point from which they buy the food to the place where it is disposed of.

• Note: The teacher needs to find the landfill that is closet to the school and tell the students where it is, and how far (in miles) it is from the school location.

  -	Students use language arts to define the meaning of each word within Food Energy Cycle
  1.	Each word within the Food Energy Cycle must be defined, and used in complete grade level sentences that can be directly applied to the energy cycle.
  2.	Students will study each of the diagramed words, noticing how they are interrelated, and use energy in one form or another. This part of the lesson is intended to give students an opportunity to be able to think independently, then share in small groups, then share their thoughts with the class.

• Note: This part of the lesson will be somewhat time consuming because of the sharing, but in order for the students to gain an understanding this part of lesson should not be skipped.

The diagrams of the Food Energy Cycle and Food Comparison Chart should be given to each student, as well as posted on a wall for the entire class to review together. The diagram and charts give students an opportunity to use expanded visual learning, and creates a learning place where learning can happen in a variety of ways attacking all of the learning modalities.

Diagram created by Kelly Clark

This diagram of the Food Energy Cycle should be given to each student, as well as posted on a wall for the entire class to review together.

Food Comparison Chart

Food: Apple

Food: Apple Juice

Food: Milk

Food: Ground Beef

Food: Frozen Pizza (pepperoni)

Lesson Background

How far from our homes (home to store) do we travel to buy the foods we eat regularly? Do we buy our foods from a grocery store, a farmers market, or do we grow some of it ourselves? Are we examining the true cost of foods when we buy them or do we make the assumption that we are paying the true costs?

How do we get to our food?

When we venture out to make our food purchases are we within walking distance, is riding a bicycle a viable option, is using public transportation an option? Or is where we buy our food only accessible by car? If the public transportation system is near our homes, is it in a condition (clean and safe) that makes it so that we are willing and wanting to use it? The public transportation also needs to be located within a walking distance from our homes so that we can carry our purchases. All of these matters should be considered if our goal is to transform neighborhoods into defined communities; should be considered if our desires are to change the way we use energy, save energy, and limit our misuse of energy.

Perhaps there we can align our thoughts about food production with systems already in place; something as simple as transportation can change the way we affect energy output, while simultaneously bring employment opportunities to cities. The filmmaker Michael Moore, and native of Michigan has suggested to President Obama that instead of closing all of the autoplants that they be used as factories where alternative energy vehicles be made. (8) This sort of forward thinking has the potential to provide tens of thousands of jobs all while transforming our energy use to a variety of sources versus straining just a few.

What makes sense?

We cannot forever be willing and able to hire people in foreign lands to produce our goods (food, electronics, otherwise). The cost of labor seems only small in the short-run, but in the long run the cost is incredibly expensive. We are living in a time where we refer to most of what we have according to the price we pay at the cash register. The price at the cash register is not the real cost, it is a portion of cost, it is the subsidized cost. If we factor in the cost of energy from steps seed to landfill, we can see our costs are subsidized. All work, labor in this case, requires energy, human physical labor requires more energy than it does to sit and type this unit, but labor being labor we should be mindful of how we use it. How much cheaper is it to have a person in Vietnam can tuna than it would be to can the tuna near where the tuna is caught? The price is not just the labor; there is the energy cost of machinery, and transportation. Employing people at wages were their earnings allow them to afford the very products they make is fair and makes way for everyone to live healthier happier lives. Employing people in Maine to catch, package, and sell shrimp and lobster makes much better sense to energy usage and economically than shipping frozen shrimp form Thailand.

Growing Food

Modern crop farming varies widely in its scope, ranging from intensively managed small plots to commercial farms covering thousands of acres. Successful crop farmers must be expert at selecting the kinds and varieties of plants that are adapted to their soils and climate. They must be skilled in preparing soil and in planting, growing, harvesting, and storing crops. They must be able to control weeds, insects, and diseases, and they need good marketing skills to gain reasonable returns from their crops.

Food Crop Chart

Gardens

Community gardens exist in many nations and in both urban and rural areas. They vary in what they offer according to local needs. Some provide open space and greenery. Sometimes they provide cheap vegetables for a local community. With the spread of cities and consequent land scarcity, the demand for communal gardens seems to be increasing. Community gardens are now recognized to be an international phenomenon, and urban gardening is widely seen to be a way of improving local food supplies as well as leisure and recreational activity. (9)

The concept of community gardens should be very broadly conceived to include many kinds of civic intervention with local governments and other public agencies acting in partnership with citizen groups of various kinds. (10)

Some of the mentioned questions and thoughts about food are widely known, yet there is an apathetic attitude that interferes with our willingness to make the choices that are so vital to a healthier and cleaner environment.

Travel, Food, Affordability

In order for citizens to effectively participate in efforts to improve the environment, they must certainly be informed about the nature of the problems and the effect of environmental contamination on them. But it is also necessary to change popular habits of mind and action, ones that have led to the previous acceptance of the unfortunate environmental practices and the disempowered of citizenry. (11)

The proliferation of private cars contributed to the decline of use and the availability of public transit. Most municipalities are that the system needs to be economically self-sustaining, something that is hard to achieve. Public transit is arguably a tool that helps achieve housing affordability, as it prevents the need to own and maintain a car. Buses, therefore, need to be an integral part of the region and the neighborhood planning process.

Maybe how we determine if housing is affordable has to include our ability to get to places where we can buy healthy foods without having to power a car. Maybe we have to begin to build and design communities where people can work collectively in food gardens (these types of communities probably would be a lesson in socializing and getting along with one another better too).

In building of communities and in-turn changing how food is purchased we can lessen our carbon footprints. The food industry accounts for 10% of all fossil fuel use in the United States. Of all the energy consumed by the food system, only about 20% goes towards production; the remaining 80% is associated with processing, transport, home refrigeration and preparation. (12) This energy usage could change considerably by simply changing how we build our communities; where food to buy is located in relationship to home.

How far we travel for food to home is relatively easy to calculate, but there are more distances to be considered in food travel calculation. Calculating the distance a food item has traveled varies in complexity depending on whether the item is made up of a single ingredient or multiple ingredients and the mode of transportation used to carry the item. (13) Still we could lower the traveling distance and therefore the energy usage by having our food purchasing places closer to home.

How about decreasing the impact of food energy by selling food directly to schools, hospitals, prisons and other institutions is becoming an increasingly popular option. Selling food to institutions creates a reliable market for the farmer and provides great health and economic benefits to the consumer. Farm-to-institution programs also reduce food miles. (14). A better and smarter way to decrease our usage of energy as it relates to food.

What about our waste

There are some things we know for sure in reference to how food is wasted and poor energy usage, like the farther food travels, the more fossil fuels are required for transport. The burning of fossil fuels leads to the emission of greenhouse gases, which contribute to global warming.

There is also the energy use in waste, how we dispose of our food after we no longer want what is leftover. There is the throwing of things away that has become a toxin to our environment; are we considering where the trash-man takes our unwanted leftovers? Where do our scraps of food and trash go?

Our scraps and food and trash usually go straight to a landfill and or incinerator. Landfills and dumping are related and overlapping strategies that differ in intent and approach. A "sanitary landfill," currently the most popular approach to waste disposal in the industrialized nations, is a site (usually lined with plastics) where garbage is spread, buried in layers, and capped to minimize the leaching of toxins from water flowing through (15) (this does not usually work as well in practice as in theory)

The toxins that have been created are extremely hard to deal with at landfills because of the amount of plastics we use. We wrap all of our foods in plastic over and over again. Americans use about 100 billion polythene bags per year (16). If you stopped sleeping and did nothing but watch plastic bags be produced at a rate of one per second, it would take nearly two thousand lifetimes to observe only one year's worth of plastic bag production. (17) Disposable and paper bags use more energy and produce more waste than plastic bags. (18) There are those people who believe in recycling, but recycling is a huge energy sucking process, and most of the recycling we think we are doing is not even recycling. Most plastics aren't so much recycled as they are downcycled, Carol Misseldine, sustainability coordinator for Oakland, California, notes; We're not recycling plastic bags into plastic bags. They're being downcycled, meaning that they're being put into another product that itself can never be recycled. (19)

There was a time when Americans could and did care for the garbage they created in useful and recycle ways. In times of old before the invent of modern day trash collecting (which I appreciate and would not want to go without) when garbage collection was rare in most American cities and people did not want to give up their waste. The garbage that was collected was often collected informally, by people liked the so called "swill children" who once went from house to house in American cities to gather food refuse to sell as fertilizer or for hog food (20)

If a community can't sort and deal with its waste intelligently—then their waste truly becomes waste, because they can't close the loop back to a useable substance. (21)