How diverse is your diet?

Summary:

Your class will have the opportunity to consider how the variety of fresh produce, such as vegetables and fruits, has become less diverse in recent decades. They often travel many more thousands of miles than similar foods would have done in the past, and are available to buy at most times of the year, even when they are out of season in the UK. These activities enable everyone to evaluate how we source and buy our foods, how to increase the range of foods we eat, and how buying and eating greater varieties of apples, carrots and green beans can be better for farming, the environment, and our own health and wellbeing.

This resource works alongside our short ‘Diet Detective’ film:

Themes and topics:

• Realising where our foods come from, and where they used to come from.
• Understanding seasonality and the impact of consumer demand for certain foods all year round.
• Knowing where and how a variety of ingredients are grown, harvested, and processed.
• The principles of a healthy and varied diet.
• Environmental breakdown and effects on other living things.
• Foodchains: Farmland is important for many different food chains, forming food webs, in our countryside

Suggested age range:

Upper primary and lower secondary.

Links with other activities:

These activities could be used in conjunction with the ‘What was farming like before modern technology?’, ‘Where have all our songbirds gone?’, ‘What is the future of our countryside?’, and ‘Land of the Giants’ learning resources.

Learning outcomes:

By the end of this activity students will:

• Have a greater awareness of how our food buying habits have changed over time and how the food industry has moved towards fewer varieties of certain foods, such as apples, carrots or specific animals in a world of mass production and intensive farming.
• Realise that there are many food producers in the UK producing local, less-intensively produced varieties of food and the benefits this has for them, the environment, and the animals or plants involved.
• Be able to better advise their families on where and what to buy, how to buy seasonally (and the associated benefits) and be more informed for when they are buyers of foods themselves.