Food Waste

Created Feb. 7, 2024 by Sara Kamen, Grace David, Katie Clark

Unit: Food Waste

Persistent Issue: There is too much food waste happening in schools

Central Question: How do we decrease food waste in Cafeterias?


Lesson 1: Grabber and Introduction

Three Day Project


Introductory Grabber: For the grabber teachers are going to have the kitchen staff collect all of the wasted food from lunchtime the day before it is introduced and teachers would put it in trash bags and bring it into the classroom and show the students just how much food they are wasting. This will cause the problem of food waste to become much more real in the student’s mind and forces them to ask more questions about what is going on.This is relevant to the school’s goal, which is to decrease the amount of food wasted.


Culminating Activity

Introduction: When students enter the classroom they will see the piles of food waste from the cafeteria and they will be told to examine it with a worksheet and talk about what they see and smell and think is happening but they will not be told what the food waste actually is.


Video: In a small video the students will learn about what food waste is and why it is bad that we are wasting so much food especially since people in other countries don’t have as much food that we have. Then they will begin their own research about how much food each plate should have and the correct portion sizes for small kids. They will also learn about how food waste is affecting the planet and the environment that the students are living in.


Video on waste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0lQ3ljjl40


Activity Overview:

  1. Students will be filling out a 5 senses worksheet about the food waste when the first walk in and see the wasted food. This will cause them to create their own questions about what they think they see.

  2. Students will be researching in their groups what the correct portion size for students are and then they are going to be creating a “plate” of the correct sizes. Once they create their plates we are going to hang them up around the classroom and the students are going to present them to the other students of the classroom.


Assessment: Teachers will create a quiz over the correct portion sizes and what food waste is doing for the environment.


Debriefing: After this project is over students will continue to monitor food waste by having a “yuck bucket” where students from each table will dump their food waste into the bucket and at the end of every lunch we will weigh the food waste and whichever table has the least amount of food waste will get a quarter put into their bucket and at the end of the semester whichever table has the most amount of quarters will win a prize.


Rubric:


Whole Grains

Fruits & Veggies

Sweets

One large item or two small items (One roll, two crackers)

1 big fruit or 2 small fruits (One big apple or 2 small clementines)

1 small sweet


Schedule:


Day ONE: They will be filling out the senses worksheet about the “yuck bucket” and they will be doing research over food waste as well as seeing the video on food waste.


Day TWO: They will be getting in their groups and creating the plates of food portion.


Day THREE: They will be presenting their findings and plates to the class and then the teacher will be hanging them up for other classes to see.

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