Tossed Out (food waste)

Tossed Out

FYS

Where does food come from? What's for dinner?

Take a meal and find out where it came from.

Materials: King Corn and Barbara Kingsolver
Project:

Book of Choice (cod, tomato, etc.)

Where does our food come from? (Fast Food Nation)

What is what we're eating doing to us? (?)

Units:

1. What's for dinner?
2. Where does dinner come from? (Fast Food Nation and Corn King)
3. What is dinner doing to or for us?
4. What else might we eat for dinner?

Find a list of other documentaries about food.
Find an academic article from different fields about each of these issues (perhaps enlist Carol Cummings?).

For teaching about food...

The Food Movement: Its Power and Possibilities

Timeline: Milestones of the Food Movement

In the forty years since the publication of Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet, a movement dedicated to the reform of the food system has taken root in America. Lappé’s groundbreaking book connected the dots between something as ordinary and all-American as a hamburger and the environmental crisis, as well as world hunger. Along with Wendell Berry and Barry Commoner, Lappé taught us how to think ecologically about the implications of our everyday food choices. You can now find that way of thinking, so radical at the time, just about everywhere—from the pages of Timemagazine to the menu at any number of local restaurants.

Projects, ideas, etc.

Mark Bittman's Food blog on the NYTimes.

The True Cost of Tomatoes (Bittman)

Here's the passage that caught my eye:

Most of us eat or buy industrially produced tomatoes, and it doesn’t seem too much to ask that the people who pick them for us be treated a little more fairly. Speak to your supermarket manager or write to the head of the chain you patronize (the easiest way to do this is to visit this page on the CIW site). Supermarkets, I expect, are as susceptible to public pressure as fast-food chains.

There are few places in the country where migrant and immigrant farmworkers are treated well; in Immokalee, at least, they’re being treated better. Bit by bit.

This is a case study...the course could be organized around case studies with digital literacy projects in response to the studies....

Food Book

Fair Shares for All: A Memoir of Family and Food by John Haney