Sustainable Food Production

• Objectives

  Differentiate between the concepts of organic food production, local food production and sustainable food production.Identify local pood producers and ways in which the students might increase the amount of local foods in their diets.Explain how consuming local foods might be more sustainable, or not.

• Sustainable local food

  Read this article as an introduction to the subject.

• 1. Create a personal food journal. Monitor the things you eat during 3 days. The 3 days do not have to be consecutive, but they should be representative of a typical day in your diet.
  2. Create a master shopping list of all the items you would need to make what you ate in the 3 days of your food journal. What would it take to feed you? When you do this consider the recepies. For example if you ate Pizza, you need wheat flower, tomatoes, cheese, pepperoni etc. If you ate a Hamburger you will need beef for the paties, wheat for the bread, onions, lettuce, tomatos, eggs and olive oil for the mayonaise…. Get the picture?
  3. Now that you have a “Grocery List”. Use the internet, the phone book, your contacts in the local comunity, the grocery stores, whatever mean is at your disposal to identify local producers for the product you need. By local I am going to mean within 100 miles of ECSU. For example, you can identify a poultry farm in South Mills that sells organic eggs and chicken meat, or a farmer at a local farmers market that sells seasonal vegetables like cabbage or Collards.
  4. As you will have found from researching the articles i gave you and other information from the internet, local doesn’t mean sustainable. When possible make sure that the farming practices used to produce the items in your grocery list are actually sustainable.
  5. I am concious that not all items in the list will be found locally, so identify those and explain why do you think they are not available.
  6. Lastly identify 5 things you could do to increase sustainable farming practices in your community.
  7. Document all aspects of your investigation on a report. The report should include the individual food journal, the master grocery list. The sources for the items in the list you were able to find localy and the ones you were not. and a conclusion which should include the list of 5 things from step 6.

Your report should be done as a Word document, and should include the following components.

1. Title page name etc

2. Introduction – Develop an introduction that presents your investigation. You can use the questions from the case study as a guide. A good introduction should include background information on the topic, the definitions your reader will need to understand your report and a brief summary of what you are going to tell us in the body of the report.

3. Content – You can call this section content, or you can divide the section into several sections each with their own title, but in general the content sections of your report should contain the results of your investigations. In other words, the answers to the questions posted in your case study. Don’t limit yourself to answering each question with a sentence or two. The questions are realy just there to guide you and point you in the right direction. Make sure you investigate the topic and write an complete account of what you found. Feel free to include tables, figures or pictures, or any other visual aid you can embed in the word document.