Geographical Association

Growing, trading, buying and preparing food is part of the story, but the final phase involves its preparation, which often involves cooking. This final part of the journey to the table also has an environmental impact which cannot be forgotten. This course explores the implications of food preparation for the planet.

Completion of this course is intended to be a CPD activity, rather than a 'resource grab'. You are encouraged to adapt the ideas presented here to develop your own resources or unit of work. The intention is that completion of the unit will result in the development of new skills and pedagogical techniques, and offer opportunities for reflection.

If you are working through this course as part of a TLA learning journey at Stage One or Two it will be assumed that you have already completed Getting Started, where you will have decided upon a learning and change focus for your journey. Completing this course should enable you to refine this focus. As you work through this course keep referring to section two of the learning journal,
in which you create an action plan for your
learning journey.

View TLA Stage One Writing Frame
View TLA Stage Two Writing Frame

For billions of the world's population, the main energy that is used to cook food is fuelwood, charcoal or biomass (including dung) and cooking is done on a traditional stove of simple, and often inefficient, design. This results in health problems for those doing the cooking, often women. There is also a waste of scarce resources, and production of further particulate pollution which has the potential to add to both and atmospheric pollution. As with food, UK consumers are distanced from the direct consequences of their energy use.

Before commencing the course, think about the following questions:

• Which fuel source do you or your students use to prepare food?
• What impacts does this have on the environment?
  
• Are you always aware of the impacts that using a microwave oven, for example, has?

A chulha is an adaptation of a traditional stove used in the north of India. As in many other parts of the world, these stoves are made from local materials, such as mud from river floodplains. The manufacture of the stoves provides employment, and the design and manufacture results in an affordable piece of 'appropriate' technology.

View this video of the reinvented chulha, designed by Philips Design, and which was a finalist of the Index: Award 2009, an award given to designs that improve life. You can read more about it at the Index: website

View larger video on Index Award website

Having viewed the video and website, produce a problem-solution chart, which compares the traditional stove with the newly adapted stove, and suggests why switching to this alternative technology might be beneficial on a range of scales. The chart should identify a possible problem, and match it with an appropriate solution.

Some further information is available on these two websites:
SciDev Network
Asian Window

Photo by Flickr user Mike Rohde made available under Creative Commons

Now it is time to think about how you and your student's kitchens differ from those we have been looking at so far. There is a link here with the work on sustainability that was covered in Climate Change and Food Supply.

Here is an interesting stimulus article exploring the role of black carbon (soot), still produced in vast quantities in the developing world, as a contributor to climate change.

Look at the image to the right, which could be used as a stimulus image with students. Click on the image for a larger version.

Identify all the potential requirements for secondary energy use, electricity or gas, that you can see in the image.

In kitchens in houses throughout the developed world, there are many pieces of equipment which require electricity to operate, but perform tasks that could be done in a different way, or are not particularly important tasks.

Now consider the following questions:

• Which of the functions these gadgets perform could be said to be unnecessary?

• Why do you think we still want to own these gadgets?

The next phase of the unit looks at the wider implications of cooking using fuels like wood and charcoal.

Let us go back to thinking about stoves. What further impact does cooking on the stoves have beyond the health of those who use them in their homes?

There are some wider connections to be explored here to bring in the concept of scale and begin to explore the personal actions which lead to a global consequence.

Take a look at this article about new super-efficient 'rocket' stoves.

Then watch the short film below, made by an organisation called EarthJustice, which looks at the issue of soot, or black carbon, in the atmosphere. List the connections that are made between the burning of fuels and the wider impacts on the environment.

Consider someone cooking their meals by microwave and then someone else by stove. Can you make and explain a connection between these two people?

To bring out the global connections involved in this area, it’s worth looking at the problems that the soot produced by stoves has once it settles out of the atmosphere, or is washed out by rainfall.

Read this article in the Guardian from October 2009.

Think about a way of communicating the fear that someone living in one of the communities in Pakistan featured in the article might have over their future.

Imagine that you sit down with this person, and work out with them how they can get their message across to the wider world community. Start to plan some campaign materials to help spread the person's message to the wider world, and what the message might be.

Photo by Flickr user hans s made available under Creative Commons

We now have to consider an interesting comparison: between the consumer in the UK pricking the foil off of a microwave ready-meal and putting it into the oven for three minutes on full power, or a mother in a less developed part of the world feeding another charcoal briquette into their stove.

Which, in the short term and long term is more damaging to the planet?

A website called Class Tools offers a range of templates to generate a range of similar activities. The website creates the templates in a range of formats, including HTML (so they can easily be inserted into a webpage, or a departmental VLE).

Consider how a discussion on this issue would be facilitated with a group of students that you teach, and how that could help consolidate work that has been done previously.

One approach might be to think of the analogy of a set of scales and weigh up the arguments on either side of the comparison. Students might be asked to move to one side of the classroom or other depending on the view they are presenting, or the idea they are supporting.

What additional support might you have to provide for the task to be accessible to the full ability range?

Discuss with your year group partner(s) and / or mentor what ideas you might develop and how you will do this.

• How have these examples and ideas help you to plan coherent and relevant learning for your pupils?
• How did you adapt them?
• What curriculum links did you focus on to link with the geography? Why did you choose them?
• How have you enabled pupils to make connections between the local and the global?
• How did you place value pupils' contributions and personal geographies? How did this impact on their self esteem and the value they place on themselves as individuals and as a group?
• How do you think these activities contribute to your pupils' understanding of the issues covered in this course?

On your learning journey

• What changes, if any did you make to your original plan? How did professional learning conversations with your coach or learning mentor influence this and the outcomes of your learning?
• How did you evaluate your own learning?
• What feedback did you receive from pupils or colleagues?
• How did you share this learning with others? What feedback have you had?

You may now wish to move on to another course in this family in order to widen and deepen your knowledge base. The courses explore a range of supporting areas and can be completed in any order you wish. You may wish to take a quick look at them before going any further.

It is important that you end by completing the Plenary section, as this allows you to reflect on your learning and fill in part three of the TLA writing frame (and part four if you are working towards Stage Two verification).

A report published in April 2011 by the Food Climate Research Network would make useful additional reading when completing this unit.

Cooking up a storm sets out what we know about the food system's contribution to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Taking a life cycle perspective, it looks at how these emissions arise, both by life cycle stage (from plough to plate to bin) and by food type. It then explores the flip side of the coin: the global impact of a changing climate on how we grow, distribute, produce and consume food.

Main image: Wooden stove in Warung by Flick user Ikhlasul Amal, made available under a Creative Commons license.