by Jackie Kirk and Mary Gale Smith
Grade levels: K-7
Subject areas: social studies, health, family studies, math, science
Key concepts: food interconnections, food production
Skills: mapping, food preparation, measuring
Location: classroom
Time: 2 hours
Materials: class copies of a world map (or one large world map for display); cake ingredients; pictures of ingredients, their production, and their processing; cake-making equipment (measuring spoons and cups, mixing bowl, wooden spoon, grater, rubber spatula, 9-by-13-inch rectangular cake pan or muffin pans and paper liners)
By the time you have eaten breakfast in the morning, you have already depended on
half the world.
— Martin Luther King
Food is a basic human need. Yet many of us, and especially young children, are distanced from the sources of what we eat. Most of us buy our food rather than grow it ourselves, and in families where food is bought packaged and pre-prepared, children have few opportunities to help in the kitchen or even to see the process of food preparation. When meals are presented ready to eat, little thought may be given to where the ingredients came from, who grew them, how they were processed, or what impact our choice of food has on our health and the health of the planet.
Cooking and preparing foods in the classroom can give children the opportunity to reclaim at least some of their food. It is a wonderful confidence- and teambuilding activity that can fit into all areas of the curriculum and make important links between home and school. Just as important, classroom cooking affords opportunities to explore our connections to other people, cultures, and environments.
In Filters Against Folly, Garrett Hardin talks of the need for citizens to develop not only literacy and numeracy, but also “ecolacy.” To be “ecolate” is to understand that the world is a complex of interconnected systems; it is to ask “And then what?” in order to perceive these connections and understand the consequences of our actions. As children are the consumers and decision makers of the future, we need to help them become aware of the ramifications of their decisions, even in the supermarket, on the lives of other people and on the state of the Earth.
Baking a world cake
In the elementary classroom, baking a cake or other dish that contains ingredients from around the world is an excellent way of raising many different issues and ideas, in addition to covering many areas of the curriculum. I used the preparation of a cake as part of our school’s One World Week celebration, but it could be part of exploring a variety of other topics. At its most basic, it is a cookery lesson. When developed and extended, it can become the starting point for an investigation into the food we eat, where it comes from, the people who produce it, and the distances it travels.
The recipe presented here (see sidebar) is very simple and adaptable. You can adjust the fruit and nut ingredients to focus on one particular country or issue or, in a pre-school class, on one letter of the alphabet. You can also modify ingredients in order to make use of what is available locally (e.g., choose either zucchini or carrots), to avoid nuts (use coconut instead), or to replace all-purpose flour with whole wheat flour for a focus on nutrition. If you do not have access to a stove, the cake can easily be prepared in the classroom and then taken elsewhere for baking. You could even bake the cake at home and then have students sample it and speculate on its ingredients. If the cake is made as a class project, the measuring of various ingredients could be assigned to groups of students.
If possible, try to obtain some fair-trade products to use in your cake, or use some organic ingredients or free-range eggs, and discuss with the children the decisions you made when buying these products. Even better, take the children shopping for the ingredients and present them directly with the decisions.
As each of the ingredients is added to the mixing bowl, share information about where the ingredient may have been produced. (See the sidebar “About the Ingredients,”), and ask students to check the package to see if the source is identified on the label.) Have students find and mark these locations on a large classroom map. Discuss how each ingredient was grown and how it has been processed to arrive here in its present form. (Upper elementary students may research the production and processing of each ingredient in advance of making the cake.) If possible, show pictures of the raw ingredients being harvested around the world and being processed by real people (you might develop a PowerPoint presentation from Internet sources). Encourage the children to think about the lives of the pickers, factory workers, and shippers who have all contributed to their cake.
Follow-up and extension activities:
- After making the cake, have students create a display table with the raw ingredients, pictures of the harvesting of raw materials, and maps with the routes each ingredient might have taken to arrive here. Include the children’s written comments about the cake, as well as comments by other people in the school.
- If fair trade products have been used in the cake, discuss the advantages of fair trade (i.e., people get a living wage, child labor may be reduced so that children can go to school) and the disadvantages (e.g., the products usually cost more). You could use a similar approach to discussing organic foods.
- Once students have located the origins of the ingredients on a map, have them estimate the distance each product has traveled. You could also guide students to identify aspects of food production and distribution that use energy (e.g., farm machinery, fertilizer and pesticide production, transportation, processing machinery, packaging production, refrigeration).
- Have students identify which ingredients in the cake are local and which come from afar. For the non-local ingredients, have students suggest local substitutes (e.g., instead of pineapple, try apple sauce; instead of walnuts, try hazelnuts; instead of raisins, try dried cranberries or blueberries). Encourage students to suggest other class cookery projects that would use locally produced ingredients. Discuss the advantages for the environment in choosing local foods.
- Ask students to think of ways to reduce the amount of packaging when purchasing ingredients (e.g., buying in bulk from bulk containers, buying loose fruits and vegetables, taking cloth shopping bags).
- Discuss the nutritional benefits of adding nuts, fruits, and vegetables to the cake.
- Have students investigate the process of sugar refining and find out which sugar source — beets or sugar cane — is more environmentally friendly. Both require large amounts of energy, but the by-product of sugar cane extraction can be burned as a source of energy, whereas the refining of sugar beets uses fossil fuels. Children could also investigate the milling of wheat or the process of turning cacao beans into chocolate.
- Discuss the possibility of putting “the world” in a lunch box or of making muesli that is “The World in a Bowl.”
- Have students collect a variety of food labels and add these to the map to reinforce the connections they have with the rest of the world through food.
- Enhance the lesson with a field trip to a market garden or community garden so that students can see how such vegetables as carrots and zucchini are grown (or visit another food-producing facility to learn about the processing of other ingredients). Another possible field trip is a supermarket tour where students can investigate the sources of various foods.
- Invite local farmers or gardeners to talk about their produce, and, if it is autumn, ask them to bring some samples so that the children can taste freshly harvested natural foods.
- Introduce author Candace Savage’s idea of assessing food choices based on the criteria of the 5 Ns: nutritious, now, near, natural, and naked. Ask these questions:
Is it nutritious?
Is it fresh or in season now?
Does it come from nearby?
Is it natural or processed as little as possible?
Is it naked or packaged as little as possible?
- Have students choose a favorite food item and develop a poster to inform others of the ways in which the food connects us to the rest of the world.
- Have students conduct a community food audit by mapping the area around the school and noting all of the places where food is grown, refined, packaged, or sold.
- Connect the cake baking with science lessons on the chemical reactions of leavening agents or on plant growth.
- Read stories and books that focus on foods, such as “Stone Soup” (there are many variations of this children’s favorite) or books by Ann Morris, such as Bread, Bread, Bread (Viking, 1989).
- Have students research the ways in which plants and animals raised for food have been distributed around the world through history (e.g., by explorers, sailors, and immigrants).
- With older students, do concept clarification exercises so that students learn to distinguish between farming (small agricultural holdings run by families) and agribusiness (large tracts of land given over to production of single crops run by large corporations); between subsistence crops (crops grown to feed a family) and cash crops (crops grown to sell and bring money into the family or corporation). Students could research sustainable agriculture (where practices are used that ensure the land will continue to produce food for future generations). They could discuss what happens when farmers are forced to rely on one export crop instead of growing food that is more suitable for their land and which could, in a less processed form, feed their own people.
Jackie Kirk has baked many “world” cakes with children in different countries. Formerly an elementary school teacher, she is now a research associate at the McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women in Montréal, where she works particularly on teacher training in emergency and post-conflict settings. Mary Gale Smith teaches home economics education in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia. The original version of this article was written by Jackie Kirk; it was expanded and updated in 2005 by Mary Gale Smith.
This article is reprinted from the book Teaching Green:
The Elementary Years, 242 pp, 2005. Available from
www.greenteacher.com.
This teaching idea is based on “The Whole World Cake,” an activity in “Live Thoughtfully: An RE Curriculum for Global Citizenship,” a teaching resource for ages 7 to 11 produced by the Christian Aid Society (available in PDF format on-line at <www.christianaid.org.uk/> at the“le@rn zone”).
Reprinted from Teaching Green: The Elementary Years,
242 pp, 2005. Available from Green Teacher,
www.greenteacher.com
References
Books
Hardin, Garrett. Filters against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Elegant. Viking, 1985.
Savage, Candace. Eat Up: Healthy Food for a Healthy Earth. Douglas and McIntyre, 1992.
Savage, Candace. Get Growing. Douglas & McIntyre, 1991.
Fair trade products
Bridgehead markets fair trade products globally. For information, contact Bridgehead at 366 Bank Street, Ottawa, ON K2P 1Y4, 1-800-565- 8563, <www.bridgehead.ca>.
The Fair Trade Federation has a listing of retail stores selling fair trade products in each state of the U.S. <www.fairtradefederation.org>.
TransFair Canada and TransFair USA websites have information on fair trade and directories of outlets for fair trade coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, and fruit (see <www.transfair.ca/> or <www.transfairusa.org>).