Which food chain should feed the future of America?
In our "Food Chains" unit we learn about the four food chains that feed America, and we attempt to weigh the pros and cons for each. This unit culminates in students creating a website which will share information, and attempt to guide the eating choices of their fellow Americans. While we use some supplemental texts, this unit is based on the book The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Instead of using the cover art from the book itself, the cover art to the right was created by Amisaday Cedeno as part of an assignment for class. We agreed it was better than the cover of the actual book. |
Cover Art Compliments of Amisaday Cedeno
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Lesson Plans (click the blue links)Week 1: Food, INC
Our food unit always starts with the cinematic equivalent of a kick to the face. Food, INC is an incredibly powerful documentary that pulls back the curtain on the food industry. It's a great kick-off to our unit, because it creates such buy in from students that when we crack the spine of The Omnivore's Dilemma, the book practically reads itself. Also, images like "a golden river of corn" are really much more effective when seen. During the movie portion of this unit, we stop at particularly powerful images, and students make objective observations about them. Then, we practice making inferences, in this case, the inferences will connect the information in the documentary to students' own food choices.
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Materials |
Week 2: Background
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While the Food, INC documentary does a great job at showing what students are in for during our food unit, it's a bit short on engagement for me to truly know whether students have background knowledge about our food industry. This week is devoted to developing schema, learning some of the lingo, and basically making sure we can talk the talk before we start walking down the long and winding road our food takes on its way from farm to table.
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Omnivore's Dilemma Books Mix and Mingle Sentence Strips
Mind Map Directions Four Corner's Discussion Exit Ticket Questions: Food Chains Vocabulary Real or Processed Presentation |
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This week, we'll start reading about the industrial food chain in our primary text: The Omnivore's Dilemma. We'll use our classmates (from previous years) websites to work as paired text with Michael Pollan's knowledge. The goal of this week is to get deep enough in the book that we've read enough "meat" to start engaging meaningfully with the information.
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Omnivore's Dilemma Books
Example / Non Examples of Effective Websites Web Design Rubric Differentiated Chapters
Website Analysis Criteria Student Website Exemplars (see links at the bottom of this page.) |
Week 4: Ode to the Rogue Lunch Lady
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Of all the TED talks we use in our curriculum, Ann Cooper's is one of my favorite. I love how she is a real-life lunch lady. She isn't some researcher who studies lunch ladies. She is in the trenches, growing healthy food for her kids every day. I also love her deep rage. Being our first paired "text" of the unit, we'll introduce our paired text connection tool this week. It is a refined version of the connection tool we used in our equality unit. We will, of course, continue reading in the Omnivore's Dilemma as well.
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Omnivore's Dilemma Books
Speech Transcript Notice/Wonder Chart Bilingual Chapters School Lunch Menu Blank Lunch Menu Rubric Sweden vs. American Lunch Images School Lunch 4-Corner's Discussion Exemplars of student writing. |
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We've finally made it! The end of the industrial food chain. Honestly, the end couldn't have come fast enough. Did you see those vast ponds of pig urine? Yuck. To celebrate the end of our first food chain, we'll write, and design, the first of the four web pages that will make up our final web design project.
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The industrial organic food chain is so similar to the industrial, that neither we, nor Michael Pollan spend a lot of time describing it. We will introduce our second paired text: Tristram Stuart's "The Global Food Waste Scandal." While at it's core, the speech shares how deeply wasteful our current food system is, I find it hopeful that when push comes to shove, our planet is currently producing far more food than we could ever need.
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Tristram Stuart Transcript
Bilingual Chapters |
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We'll take our second crack at writing and web design this week. Hopefully, the quality and sophistication of both the writing and the web design can improve based on our examination of examples of each score point earned during the first round of web design.
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Google Sites
Industrial Organic Google Questions Writing tools page Web-design rubric Oral Presentation Rubric |
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We'll use a jigsaw reading methodology this week to study Joel Salatin's amazing Polyface Farm. I learned recently watching a Netflix show called The Paleo Way that if all farms were run like Joel's, all the carbon dioxide pollution that has been emitted since the industrial revolution would be reabsorbed and used by plants in only ten years. It's easy to look at the food industry from a zero-sum perspective (we have to kill the planet to feed ourselves.) Joel shows us another way.
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Bilingual Chapters
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Week 9: The Hunter / Gatherer Food Chain
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The hunter/gatherer food chain is by far the shortest, and so our study is accordingly truncated. The emphasis of this week is less on what food is eaten, and more on how time is spent, because it is important to realize that for a hunter/gatherer food chain to be successful, the people don't spend their time reading, writing, or doing web design, as our students do. They spend their time hunting, gathering, and cooking. If I'm honest, that doesn't sound like a terrible life to me.
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Week 10: Web Design Project - The Hunter/Gatherer Food Chain
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It's time to finish up our websites and spike the ball! Our food unit is at its end. We'll do our final presentations, our final web design, and then move forward into the glory that is our inquiry-based research unit!
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Web Design Project
Project DescriptionFor our food chains unit, we create and publish a website that answers the question: which food chain should feed the future of America? Click on some of the links below to see what amazing work our students have created. Students write evidence-based summaries of each food chain, and based on those descriptions, they craft a digital argument explaining whether or not each of four food chains should drive our future. There is no right answer! Each food chain has pros and cons, so students are free to truly explore their options.
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Success Skills
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Web Design Process [Sustained Inquiry Loops]
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This process is repeated four times: once for each food chain.
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Professional Website Evaluation |
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Web-Design Evaluation
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Super Student
Web-Design Exemplars |
Common Core Literacy Standards Addressed by this Project