Nourish Unit

Our Project:

For our Nourish Unit project, we had to make an impact in our community. Our group chose to shop smarter. Using our knowledge of how supermarkets are layed out, we determined the best route you can take in a supermarket that has you stop at all the things you need, and pass all the things you don't really need. We know that all fresh products are placed on the perimeter of the store, so we created this map and used the supermarket most local to the San Marin area, Harvest Market, for our path/map. Below is an image of the map without the path drawn in.

Above is the map without the pathing on it but also without markings as to what areas you should stay away from. For example, we shaded the frozen food aisles red since they are primarily processed foods and aren't a part of shopping smarter. By buying those foods, you support the big industrial food companies and it isn't the healthiest food for you. Below is the map with the optimal path to get the freshest food in the supermarket and what aisles to stay away from.

Once we had our plan and our map, we created a presentation to share our idea to educate people on how to shop smarter in a grocery store. Below is our google slides presentation.

Content:

Organic: Food grown without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. We looked for foods like this when we made our map.

Non-GMO: Foods grown without being genetically modified. We looked for foods like these as foods to get when you visit the grocery store for our map.

GMO: Foods that are genetically grown to be larger, taste better, detur pests, and look shinier or more appealing to eat. These are the kind of foods to stay away from because you don't know what makes them taste better or make pests not want to eat them.

Fair Trade: Food that was given a fair trade from farmer to distributor. You see this label on fruits like bananas because the farmers from growing countries got a fair trade for their goods. This is important because some farmers in growing countries don't get a fair amount of money for their goods. We made sure to look at that when we made our map.

Ecosystem: An ecosystem is made up of different factors that all support each other. We looked at a local ecosystem on our school campus during this unit.

Decomposers: These would include things like worms that break down organic material and are very important to a thriving ecosystem. We saw a worm when we looked at our food garden at San Marin.

Primary Consumers: These would include animals like deer that eat plants. There are lots of deer around the San Marin area, but we didn't see one when we looked at our garden.

Secondary Consumers: These are carnivores and can include things like birds and spiders. We saw both birds and spiders in our local ecosystem.

Energy: The sun is an ecosystem's main source of energy but it can also be something like a heat lamp or a light. The sun was our garden's main energy source.

Food Wheel: A food wheel shows what foods are in season when. A food is in season when it is able to grow the best. Some foods grow better in the fall when it is colder because they die in the heat, some plants grow all year because they have simple growing conditions.

Local Food Resources: These are local farms and farmers markets. Farmers markets are the best ways to support local farmers because they money is going directly to the farmers.

Reflection:

I feel like we were successful as a group. We collaborated well and used critical thinking to complete this project. Our idea originally was to tell the manager of Harvest to move their store around so you need to walk through the fresh produce to get to the unhealthy food instead of the other way around. Our group then realized that it would be hard to make a change like that, so we had to critically think. We then thought of the fact that we can't change the store, so we educate the people to change. I feel like that was a good solution to our problem. I also feel like our presentation was well put together, we used bullet points to get the simple ideas so it is easy for the audience to read and so we can expand upon the idea in our oral presentation. I feel like while that was good, it made our presentation feel like it had no substance. For the future bullet points are good, but make the presentation full of useful information. I also feel like we could have expanded the plan to talk about what fair trade, organic, and non-gmo meant and put it on the map we made.