Food Miles: How far did my snacks travel to reach me?

 As we have been watching the FIFA World Cup, we have been learning about food from all around the world. We tried some snacks from different countries too. 

To start with we looked at my lunch to see what country each item had come from.  

We then thought about how far our snacks travelled to reach us. 

We were surprised to  find out that the tuna in my sandwich was from Thailand. 

We found out that most of our fruit is grown in New Zealand.

  

   

In year 2 we used smily, straight and sad face emojis to show how far food had travelled

We guessed that many of our snacks would come from Asia.  We found that: 

*   Seaweed snacks are from Indonesia

* Really Fruity sticks are from China

*  Mini Oreos are from Indonesia

* Shapes crackers are from Australia

SO WHAT? 

We talked about the further food travels the more fuel is used and more pollution is produced. 

We watched a video about greenhouse gases and talked about 'Food Miles' and how much carbon is produced by aeroplanes. 

WHAT NEXT?

We discussed the other benefits of buying food locally: 

💚 cheaper

💚 fresher 

💚 healthier 

Celebrating Chinese New Year AND reducing our carbon footprint!

     At Garden to Table recently we celebrated Chinese New Year by making dumplings and chocolate sesame seed biscuits. 

They were delicious! We even made enough to offer some round at the enviro cluster meeting which was the same day after school. 

We are always looking at ways to be more sustainable, and Nigel, from Pest Free Howick set up a clever calculator that could work out how we can reduce our school carbon footprint by growing our own food to eat. 

In our dumplings we grew and used: 

- spring onions

- carrots

- cabbage

- garlic

- garlic chives and regular chives. 

- ginger (shop bought)

Some of these items were harvested in the school holidays and frozen. 

We did buy the dumpling wrappers and soy sauce.  We made about 160 dumplings. 

By using lots of food we had grown ourselves rather than buying it we reducing the carbon that would've been involving in growing, storing and transporting it to us. 

Our carbon saving was the same as: 

- 20 mature trees absorbing CO2 for a whole year

- Driving a petrol car for 100km in New Zealand