Hello my friends of the Omschool. Teacher Omi here with some sad science facts about
food waste. Did you know that 31% of food in restaurants, grocery stores and households gets thrown out? That's one of every three pounds of food, $283 billion worth and 1 billion meals a day thrown into landfills. What is supposed to nourish us now kills us in greenhouse gasses. Here are
sustainability lesson plans to reduce food waste by focusing on reduce, reuse, renew, repurpose and recycle. Just in time for
Catholic Lent in which we practice abstaining, fasting and living simpler.
Teach food waste statistics by show and tell. Have students analyze contents of trash in school cafeteria or classroom or at home for homeschooled kids. Assign them to watch for signs of food waste. Alas it won't be difficult. At a baseball game, I saw a four member family each get hot dogs and nachos and throw half away, then popcorn and finally sodas and ice creams, leaving behind half-full cartons littering the stands. Have students calculate the cost of such food waste.
Keep a food scraps jar. It's not just peelings that get binned. It's actual meals. Have kids start taking notes on food waste by noting how many plates of food go down the disposal. Reducing food waste begins one mouthful at a time. For one week, add all discarded food (scraped from plates, from sink trap) to a clear jar so kids can see (and smell) results. Next week, discuss and practice ways to reduce food waste by taking only what we can eat and saving leftovers for another meal.
Visit a landfill. 40% of what's meant to keep us alive goes into garbage dumps. And you won't need to actually go in. Driving by, you'll know from the greenhouse gasses from the methane stench. It's so explosive that communities are powered by it. So a kind of good thing but not at the expense of people going hungry. And on that note...
Get to know the faces of famine, world hunger and poverty. Because while those in wealthier countries are throwing away a meal a day of food, one in 11 people is starving to death. 10,000 children die each day from hunger and malnutrition. Look beyond the numbers to the people. When I was young, we were shown images of starving children and it was appalling. But children do need to see these little ones. Here's a link to AP with information and heartbreaking images of children starving in war-ravage Gaza.
Quit decorating with food. Food is to eat, not play with. It's not a toy or a decoration. Teach kids to value the food they eat, by discontinuing practices such carving Halloween pumpkins only to throw them away. Cease putting "decorative" gourds and squash out in fall. I had to laugh at a customer complaining at the plastic waste from grocery bags only to find she had a porch decked out with 20 edible but now rotting squash. 1.3 BILLION pounds of pumpkins go into landfills just in the US, each year. If you must carve a pumpkin, recycle it as animal food or donate it to a local farm. Don't plant decorative vegetables in the front yard. Plant a garden instead.
Encourage mindful eating with portion control. Teach students that during world wars, when there were food shortages and rationing, people had to control portions because it was all they had. Now, we have so much that we freely dispose of it. We all need to be reminded that starvation is terrifyingly painful process that we who are fortunate enough not to feel should not take for granted. As kids we were taught "take all you want and eat all you take." Thankfully, many kids can now eat all they want. Now it's the eat all you take part we have to work on.
Start a clean plate club. So there's good and bad in this. Part of how I lost 100 pounds was not to feel I had to clean my plate BUT to practice portion control so I could eat all I took. For children, cleaning their plates means that they determine how much food to take by assessing how much they'll eat. Help children understand that they can have seconds AFTER first serving is eaten. I call this the pancake principle. When I made pancakes, the kids would gobble up the first and ask for seconds which they would eat but more slowly. They say they wanted a third when they were still eating the second. So I'd wait till they were actually done before making round three. If they were full, I'd make and freeze the pancakes.
Lose the "it's cool to waste food" mentality. I'm going to rant a moment. Since when did it become somehow posh to leave half a plate of perfectly good food untouched? That asking for a go box (doggy bag) was tacky and uncultured?? It's not. Leaving half your dinner is what's ;ow class ignorant arrogance. It shows poor breeding quicker than anything. I didn't live through a depression but my grandparents did. And even they who liked their elegance, thought wasting food was a mortal sin. I do know what it's like to go hungry when there is plenty. Food waste is immoral, unethical and deadly to us and our planet. So ask for doggy bags, don't order so much or take smaller portions. Or do what a vegan restaurant we once frequented did and give leftovers out to homeless shelters at the end of the night.
Garden. It's not about feeling sad or ashamed of our wealth. Lesson plans about world hunger should focus on what to do, not just what not to do. Starting a garden, even a humble patio bucket of herbs or tomatoes is a tangible way to repurpose, recycle and reduce food waste.
Eat your scraps. We do not peel carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, grapes or potatoes or seed vegetables because that's where the protein, fiber and vitamins are. We scrub them and cook them skin and all. We eat our seeds too. If you must peel, scrape with a sharp peeler instead of a knife which wastes half the apple. Then save your scraps.
Reuse food waste by composting. Take that scraps jar and add it to the composter. Then use it to fertilize garden.
Repurpose food scraps for wildlife. Save toast scraps, orange peelings, seeds and cores for the bird feeder.
Learn resourcefulness from native American indigenous cultures. When I was 11, we watched a documentary on plains tribes showing how they reused everything and nothing went waste. I couldn't find that one but I did find one on the Netsilik Inuit people of Alaska and Canada from the same time. I'd lived with Tlingit tribe in Haines and seen many of these waste reduction practices in action. A favorite dish was fish head soup made from salmon fish heads. It was delicious. Have students create a chart of ways to reduce, reuse, repurpose and recycle. Each day, they can list practices they did to accomplish this.
Explore and imitate indigenous habits. I've learned that throughout the world and history, native peoples have had this self-reliant waste-not-want-not mentality and it has made them flourish. Whereas feudal cultures that relied upon slaves and practiced gluttony and over consumerism, fell. All natives no matter where they lived, survived because of their frugality and resourcefulness.
Practice sustainability with poverty cooking and wartime meals. Famines are caused by natural events like volcanic eruptions but recently they're manmade. The US and European was a direct result of capitalism from war, Dust Bowl (tenant farmers made to practice strip farming and deforestation), farmers leaving to work in factories and then bankruptcy and plant closures, all preventable. But we learned from those times, to eat like our ancestors had eaten: practically and sustainably. Here's a collection of videos and recipes for Wartime meals. The motto was "use it up, make it last, wear it out, make do or do without" is a good one to live by.
Try rationing role play. Pretend you are a child during war time or a depression. No one had to tell you to eat your dinner then. You were vegan by force, not by choice, milk, eggs, cheese and meat being strictly rationed. My father-in-law tells stories of eating whatever he could scrounge and things that would make us gag now. Like head cheese and brains in the US, In Britain, they didn't even have the actual sheep's brains and made mock brains. They also ate tripe (cow stomach lining). But they were hungry and it filled them and they were glad for it. During those hungry times, food shortages caused rationing. It didn't matter if you could afford it, if you didn't have the coupons, you didn't eat it. So have students invent recipes using rationed amounts of food and food swaps (such as fruits for sugar). Here are ration book recipes from the 1940s Experiment.
Make up mock recipes. In wartime US and England mock recipes feature versions of foods made from alternative ingredients. Like lentils instead of meat. Now it would be called vegan gastronomy and served in posh gastro-pubs. Sadly the things that were abundant and not rationed are now so expensive THEY are the posh people foods. Turnips that you couldn't give away are now $2.79 a pound. Here's a recipe for Thanksgiving Murkey (mock turkey). I love the little parsnip legs! Have students invent their own mock recipes for favorite foods like hot dogs, pizza and chicken nuggets. Picture is my War Cake recipe.
We can't single-handedly stop food waste and end world hunger but we can be the change and as Mother Theresa said, "live simply that others might simply live."
