Food and the Environment
In Scotland, we have year-round access to nutritious, affordable food, produced both at home and imported from around the world. Most of us can name foods that are part of a healthy diet, but which of those foods are also good for environmental health locally and globally?
The Food and the Environment Topic has some natural overlap with Biodiversity, Health & Wellbeing and School Grounds.
A One Planet Picnic is a picnic that is good for you and good for the planet. It is a fun way to make your food and drink choices environmentally friendly.
A Pocket Garden is a miniature garden that uses edible plants, plants that attract wildlife, and that reuses something which would otherwise have been thrown away. Each year, we invite young people to send in their designs for a colourful and exciting environmentally friendly, pocket-sized garden. Pupils who send in the winning designs are then invited to build and grow their gardens to display.
Resources
Cultural traditions, folklore, customs and crafts associated with the growing year and harvest in Scotland.
How long does it really take litter to degrade? Find out with this experiment.
This resource focusses on harvest-time and is a guide to creating your own harvest event
Calculate the carbon footprint of the food we eat and see if you can design a low carbon lunch.
Scotland grows lots of different kinds of food, all with different names, characters, tastes, and tales.
How to get started with spuds including harvest and storage, varieties, and ideas for tattie activities.
A series of lessons and resources including carbon footprints, nature, food, sea levels and examples of action, including experiments and thought provoking resources.
A series of lessons and resources exploring how we can tackle different types of waste in school, including commonly littered items and canteen waste with inspiration from author Tracery Corderoy's book ‘It’s Only One’ .
Find out more about Fair Trade and how story telling can help us to better understand how Fair Trade benefits the people who grow, make and produce the things we buy, with a follow up resource to create an Issue Tree.
Lesson covering all the things you need to host your own sustainable celebration with a planning resource to follow up with.
The Eco-Schools objectives in this area cover physical, emotional and cognitive aspects. Motivation for sustainable living is gained through practical action, emotional engagement, and improved understanding:
Hands – reconnect children and young people with raw foods and ingredients and their processes of production.
Heart – foster an appreciation of local distinctiveness and the intimate associations between place and food.
Head – develop awareness of the impacts on the environment of different methods of food production and processing.
Head : heart : hands – develop an awareness of the links between our food choices, the environment and people and places elsewhere.
Through work on the Food and the Environment Topic, pupils should:
- Understand the range of food choices available to us.
- Understand the resources and skills required for food production and processing.
- Recognise the value of healthy, stable ecosystems to food production.
- Understand the wider environmental implications of our food choices.
- Recognise the dimension of social responsibility in our food choices.
- Recognise our own food culture within a diversity of food cultures.
We support the 