Thanksgiving: Supermarkets And Fair Food

Source: Food Chains Trailer

With the Thanksgiving holiday less than a week away, many schools around the country enter into conversations with their students about being grateful for what they have, showing gratitude to others, and starting food drives for the less fortunate. The heightened awareness, while noble, should be an ongoing conversation about empathy year round, and not slotted into a month where we overindulge with too much food.

Source: Food Chain$

So this year, we chose to talk to our students about who supplies their food. We did not mean which grocery store. We posed the question: What does it mean "from farm to table"? Kids have mixed messages about farm life from rosy images in picture books, nostalgic views in commercials, or pumpkin picking during October in contrived environments for entertainment. We wanted them to know more about the people who supply fresh food to markets and manufacturers.

We showed our students the movie trailer for the new film Food Chain$, produced by Eva Longoria, that premieres around the country starting today. The full length film hopes to raise awareness about the human cost in supplying food and the plight of the farmworkers who endure the backbreaking labor to get it to us. While we may not be able to see the entire movie with our students, the trailer provides enough information for teachers to open up a discussion about the role of large supermarket chains in determining the price of food.



The power supermarkets have over revenue in the agricultural system is enormous. Supermarkets earn $4 trillion globally. Their drain on the revenue from the food supply chain has left farmworkers in poverty, while retaining huge profits for the corporations. Many farmworkers endure harsh work conditions, and in extreme cases, they have been held in debt bondage, or modern day slavery.

Many schools, including ours, participate in fundraisers for charities and causes, and we applaud all that educators and students do to help, but hopefully by raising awareness about fair food programs, we can collectively help break the chain. It's a fair trade for one of life's necessities.

For more information, please see: Food Chain$: The Revolution In America's Fields.

Organic Food: A Lesson In Information Literacy

Source: Food Tech Connect

As we head into the throws of the summer and the coming onslaught of fresh produce from local growers hitting the markets, we thought it might be helpful to provide a little information literacy into the world of organic foods. We’ve long taught our students to read the nutrition labels to compare serving size, fat content, ingredients, and more using real props such as cereal boxes. But now that organic food has become mainstream in supermarket chains, it makes sense to educate our students about organics as well.

Since this is a multi-billion dollar industry today, we want our learners to know what it means to be organic, whether it is safer to eat, what are the nutrition facts, and how to read food labels. The motion graphic What Is Organic Food from Epipheo is a good resource to start with to help students understand organic foods and, more importantly, that just because something is organic, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good for you, healthy, or nutritious.


As the video points out, organic chicken nuggets, mac ‘n cheese, or sandwich cookies can still be considered “junk food” without pesticides. It is how the food is created, prepared or raised without chemicals, genetically modified organisms, or radiation in the process. These are just a few examples. In other words, it doesn’t necessarily mean that ingredients are nutritious, just that the ingredients are organic.

Source: Foododdity (detail)

Source: USDA Organic Progra

If we want our kids to be smart consumers, they need to know who gets to use the USDA Organic label. The infographic "What Does Organic Really Mean?" provides a clear layout to explain who can use it. Only food where a minimum of 95% of the ingredients are organic can use the seal. Food that is between 70-94% organic cannot put the label on its products.

Marketing and packaging of food is no different from any other industry trying to sell its products. A little media literacy goes a long way in helping kids, and adults, make healthy choices. The Mayo Clinic’s page on nutrition and healthy eating gives a short overview of the real difference between organic foods and their traditional counterparts as to nutrition, safety and price. It makes a point that “organic” is not interchangeable with “natural.” Other terms that can also be misleading to consumers are “all natural,” “free range,” or “hormone-free.” These products are not organic.

Lastly, many consumers, let alone kids, are not aware of what those little stickers mean on every piece of produce we purchase. They are called “price look up codes," or PLUs. However annoying these little stickers might be, they provide valuable information about the food we're buying. So it makes sense to help students know what these numbers mean. The simple graphic called “Learn Your Labels” explains it all. If the produce is organic, the five digit code starts with a 9, if it is a genetically modified organism (GMO) an 8, and if it is conventionally grown a 4.

Source: Royal Hawaiian Orchards

Information and media literacy are important aspects of the learning process and equally so in making healthy choices. Anytime we can add to the overall knowledge of consumer information for our students, the wiser they become about scrutinizing the world around them.

For other infographics, please take a look at:

• Fruits, Veggies, and Pesticides
• Farm to Fork: The Story Of Our Toxic Food System

Digital Consumerism

Visually we are there. You name it; we have it from streaming videos on YouTube to television shows on Hulu. And of course, let’s not forget the treasure trove of pictures from Google, Creative Commons, and more. In other words, we have all the visuals we need to design, create, and use in teaching. Students can consume vast amounts of digital content from countless sources. If there were ever a case for teaching visually, it’s now. But even more important is to teach students to think about and interpret the quantity of digital material they come across daily.

Source: Visual-Literacy.org

To grasp the types of visual interpretations, one has only to look at the Periodic Table of Visualizations with its 100 different methods for looking at information. Like the chemical elements, this periodic table classifies the types of visualizations into eight groups, including data, strategy, metaphor, compound, concept, information, process, and structure visualizations. The table is color-coded according to these groups, and each box in the table includes a pop-up example of that particular method. The fact that there are 100 different types included in this table does not take into account the countless others that were excluded or the enormous number of other images they see. In addition, understanding visualizations is not just relegated to the sciences and geography anymore, but rather it has become a routine way to present information.

We’ve all witnessed the daily craze in using infographics to make information “simple” to digest and the countless data maps for just about anything. Information, images, infographics are all a dime a dozen. “So What?” As the deluge of digital media grows, so does the exposure to it. With that, the amount of digital consumption goes up disproportionately to the amount we can take in and process. If it were our diet, we would be obese. We need to adapt methods to teach students how to think about the things they see not as fleeting views. They need to know how to study digital content for meaning as a matter of necessity in order to weed out digital junk.

Educating our digital consumers in how to move past the sound bites, the flashy images, and the interactive movements on the computer screen takes on a larger significance in a technological world full of gadgets and gizmos. Just like food, we have plenty of treats to eat that don’t necessarily have nutritional value. The same goes for the treats we are tempted by in the digital world. They, too, add to our experience, but they do not necessarily broaden our knowledge base. Learning to question the value of what to consume will develop skills for selectivity. Digital junk is produced daily and without instruction in an educational environment can be consumed without regard to legitimacy. As educators, we need to teach the nuances of knowing what’s on one's plate and whether it is good for consumption. Teaching students how to deconstruct the marketing, design, and interconnections of information will enable our students make healthier choices about what they choose to consume.