Nourish Action Project

The idea of this project was to learn about the differences between local and industrial food networks, and to apply that knowledge into a project which would focus on one of a variety of categories:

• Teach and Learn: This category involved creating some kind of project to help teach others about the benefits of eating local and healthily.

• Grow Your Own: The aim of this category was to learn how to grow your own food at home to make your own meal.

• Change the Menu: A project in this category involved making a local, healthy meal instead of choosing processed industrial food.

• Create Community: This category focused on connecting with local farmers or other food workers.

• Shop Wisely: In this category, shopping sustainably and supporting fair trade foods was the focus.

First, the class learned about a variety of food-related topics, such as how eating locally impacts the environment and how small meal changes can help the local, national, and global communities. After this background phase, we began work on our final project. Our group chose to create a project to teach and learn — namely, a website with information about good eating habits, and flyers around the school with QR codes linking to the website. (Once again, this required utilizing skills from English to write and communicate effectively.) We also created a slide deck for our presentation to the class, which can be found below.

The Website and Presentation

Core Concepts

Industrial Food Network

The industrial food network involves all the large corporations that people typically consider "the food industry". It also involves their farmers, their transportation workers, storeowners, businessmen, and countless other workers needed to keep the system running. The industrial food network is very linear and has many steps:

• Growing: Huge industrial farms grow large amounts of a single crop (see Monocrop below). They use heavy machinery to tend to these vast quantities of crops.

• Harvesting: Heavy machinery is once again used, this time to harvest large amounts of the crops at once.

• Transporting: The harvested food is transported by truck, train, airplane, ship, or any other means. The distance may be great, so there may be multiple forms of transportation used to transport this one harvest in multiple stages. Usually, this means large amounts of carbon emissions are generated by the transportation.

• Processing: The food arrives at a large factory where it is sliced, ground, canned, boiled, frozen, mixed with chemicals or anything else imaginable. The process usually involves machines but may also require teams of factory workers to do certain labor-intensive parts of the transformation. This leaves the food far from its natural state.

• Packaging: Machinery at the factory puts food in to packages such as bags, boxes, or cans. Vibrant labels are applied to help sell the food.

• Wholesaling: The entire harvest gets distributed by wholesalers to retail outlets or restaurants. The outlets pay the food organization at this stage.

• Retailing: The retailers sell the foods in grocery stores or restaurants to customers.

• Eating: The customers eat their food after it is bought.

• Disposing: The customers dispose of their food scraps and packaging. Much of this ends up at the landfill, where the food journey ends permanently.

Evidently, the industrial food network leads to a lot of unnecessary waste. The goal of the system is to make it as effortless for the customer as possible, but in doing so the companies create unfortunate consequences for our environment and do not use sustainable methods.

Local Food Network

The local food network is just what it sounds — the team of local farmers, transportation workers, market owners and other workers who help get local food from the farms to your table. The local food network is very much a cycle, which is in stark contrast to the industrial food network. There are not as many steps to this cycle, so it is simpler and more efficient; they are:

• Growing: Local farmers prepare their soil, plant seeds, and maintain the crops until they reach maturity. They grow many types of crops at once (see Polyculture below).

• Harvesting: The farmers pick their crops from the fields, often by hand or with small and light machinery.

• Packing: The farm workers take the picked crops and put them into boxes or bags. These containers are often reusable so that the farmers can use the same containers every harvest season.

• Transporting: The farmers or hired transportation workers take the packaged food by truck to a local outlet. This might be a farmers' market, a restaurant, or perhaps a grocery store.

• Retailing: The transported food is now sold to customers. (The farmers themselves might sell it, as in the case of a farmers' market, or it might be store owners instead.)

• Eating: The customers eat the food, at home or at a restaurant.

• Disposing: The customers compost their waste and community composting centers collect it. The waste gets distributed back to the farmers, who use the waste as fertilizer for their soil. Additionally, much of the packaging is reusable, so very little gets thrown away.

In this way, the local food network is nearly self-sustaining. It provides all the necessary food to customers while creating only minimal waste and requiring only minimal resources from outside the network. Clearly, the local food network is much more environmentally sound than its industrial counterpart, and for that reason it is obvious that local food should always be preferred.

Monocrop

A monocrop is a farming scheme in which a single type of crop is grown in large quantities. While this may yield great profits, it greatly reduces the biodiversity of the ecosystem and thus is detrimental to the environment. The soil will some become "exhausted" — that is, it will no longer have its nutrients — as the single crop will pull everything out of the soil and put nothing back in. Generally, large industrial farms use a monocrop strategy.

Polyculture

A polyculture is the opposite of a monocrop. Polyculture farming is a tactic whereby a farm grows many kinds of crops together (as well as potentially having livestock, etc). By having multiple kinds of crops, each will be able to cycle the soil's nutrients better and thus the soil will not become worn out. (For instance, one crop may be very nitrogen-dependent, while another might help replenish the soil's nitrogen, and so they complement each other when grown together.) Polycultures are also more beneficial for local farms as they allow the farmer to provide a wider variety of foods to their local consumers.

Reflection

This project had both upsides and downsides. Our conscientious learning was definitely a positive, as we completed everything we needed to entirely in-class. We finished with little time to spare, so our work was planned fairly perfectly. We worked hard during the time we were given and split up the work evenly so that we could execute our ideas as best as possible. Additionally, I think our communication was strong in this project. Our presentation was professional and we presented what we had done in a concise and clear manner. There was only a minor technological issue with the iPad running the presentation, but otherwise it was smooth and well-planned.

However, collaboration was certainly an issue in this project. One group member insisted on doing things their way and often did not listen when others voiced their concerns, so it was hard to function as a group sometimes. Though everything ended up working out for the most part, there are still a few things that I think could have been improved upon with better collaboration. Additionally, our critical thinking could've been improved slightly. Our presentation involved going off of the slides to show our website, so had we thought a bit about the presentation we could've potentially avoided the issue in our presentation by asking about what device it would be presented on. That way, we would have been even more well-planned and the entire thing could have been perfect.

Despite some of the misgivings regarding this project, it was successful in the end. We applied our knowledge to create an effective product that demonstrated what we had all learned throughout the unit and could help others improve their depth of knowledge as well.