Plate to Planet

As the world's population grows, creating a sustainable food source while protecting the Earth's biodiversity has become increasingly crucial. Animal agriculture is a leading contributor to climate change and environmental degradation, as it has a large carbon footprint, leads to deforestation, water scarcity, pollution, and biodiversity loss. This instructional unit is designed to give students a comprehensive understanding of food, including its nutritional components and the significance of sustainable food production, as well as innovations in the food industry, like those by Impossible Foods, that aim to replace animal products with plant-based alternatives. Through hands-on activities such as fermenting grains and extracting protein from Chinese yams, students will learn about the work of food scientists in this area. In the culminating activity, students will evaluate the environmental impact of growing and packaging different types of foods, design a "climate impact label" for food products, and pitch their ideas to a panel of supervisors.

Module Overview: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q7X8BF60wXLg6ChVLOUsuQXmIc9-v7ZJi6SssMYVeyY/edit?usp=sharing 

For the lessons that include slide decks, please make sure you check the notes at the bottom of individual slides for instructional recommendations and suggestions.

Foods contain macronutrients and micronutrients that perform specific functions in the human body. During this lesson, students learn about macronutrients and micronutrients groups, learn to identify those groups from nutritional labels, and create a well-balanced meal using foods from those groups. This lesson will both introduce students to those concepts and prepare them to compare animal- and plant-based diets. 

Lesson Plan

Slide Deck

During this lesson, students will learn about how food scientists are working on ways to  produce sustainable food sources for a growing human population. Students learn about how the enzyme heme is produced using the process of fermentation, and then experiment with the fermentation process to better understand how it functions and the types of results that are produced.   

Lesson Plan

Slide Deck 

During this lesson, students will learn about the types of animals that meat based protein comes from and investigate statistics about consumption of those animals. They will then learn more about how cattle are raised and the water and land requirements for raising them. 

Lesson Plan

Slide Deck

In this lesson, students learn about common, animal-based foods that can be replaced with plant-based foods and companies that are selling those products. The purpose of this lesson is to help students understand that they have choices when they purchase food, and those choices can have either a large or small impact on the environment. 

Lesson Plan

Slide Deck

Food binders serve to make foods more stable, have the right consistency, and have a longer shelf life. In making plant-based foods that replace animal-based foods, food scientists work to find the right ingredients, such as those used to make food binders. During this lesson, students will learn about glycoproteins and how they can be used to make vegan food binders. Students will extract the glycoprotein from Chinese Yams, create a glycoprotein foam, and then plan and carry out their own investigation to determine which nutrient can make that foam more stable and into a better food binder.  

Lesson Plan

Slide Deck

During this lesson, students will learn about the importance of biodiversity by studying the honey bee’s role in an ecosystem and how honey bees help maintain that ecosystem’s biodiversity. Then, students learn about how environments change, primarily due to human impact, and how the loss of natural landscape leads to a decline in biodiversity. In the culminating activity, students explore the biodiversity of their school campus through observation and data collection. The purpose of this lesson is to have students understand that maintaining biodiversity is critical to how humans should think about food production. 

Lesson Plan

Slide Deck

In the previous lesson, students learned about the meaning and importance of biodiversity to maintain a healthy planet. They also learned about honey bees, their role in the ecosystem, and what losing honey bees means to that ecosystem and to the production of food. This lesson focuses on biodiversity loss and how the loss of one species impacts many other species within that ecosystem. Students research a model organism of their choosing to learn more about its current status, in terms of population and other factors, to think about how the world would be impacted by their loss. Students connect what they learned about the how livestock is raised to biodiversity loss.

Lesson Plan

Slide Deck

Having learned about the impacts of raising livestock on land, water, and biodiversity, students will further their learning by engaging with content related to the importance of reducing our carbon footprint. They then learn about how cattle contribute to climate change. The lesson ends with a brief analysis of the footprint of beef vs bread to begin to prepare them for creating a climate impact scoring system during the solutions phase of the module.

Lesson Plan

Slide Deck

In this series of lessons, students will design a “Climate Impact” scoring system and label that will be displayed on the front of food packages that informs consumers about the environmental impacts of their food choices (ex. land, water, greenhouse gas emissions). The label should be easily understood by the viewer and get the point across quickly. Students will pitch three food or meal examples with their labels to their “supervisor” at Impossible Foods, Inc. through the Pilot City platform.

Lesson Plan

Slide Deck