My Deep Learning Food Challenge

THE START:

I’m a teacher and when I sit down to plan my year I always start with the curriculum and ask how I can engage students – through those outcomes -  to do meaningful work, creating meaningful products, or to solve real problems.

 

If we want to engage our students and grow their understanding. We need to be rooted in the curriculum and have an understanding of why it matters to our students and to the world at large. That set of skills and that content need to be framed in a way that is engaging, and meaningful. It must exist outside the wall of the school.

 

We need to create connections with students, working and learning alongside them. (Fullan & Langworthy, n.d.) We need to have the skills, the deep roots to help them grow. This will help us to develop deep learning in our clases. To extend this metaphor, we need to have deep roots. Peter Wohllenben’s book, The Hidden Life of Trees gives us an understanding of how these deep roots make connections between trees. They share information and nutrients. Older trees provide aid to the younger trees. (Wohlleben, 2016)

 

We can learn a lot from nature in this sense. In the new pedagogies, we can develop deep learning alongside our students. Deep learning is about finding new knowledge, or discovering knowledge for ourselves. (Fullan & Langworthy, n.d.) As teachers, we need to be down in the mud with our kids, getting into the dirt of the learning process and engaging in meaningful, real-world activities.

 

In short: I need to be engaged in this process myself, in my own life. So, what action can I take to engage in deep learning, and also have a real-world impact? I spent some time thinking about this and I created a relatively comprehensive plan.   

 

What I am going to do:

1.       Assess my family’s food consumption habits:

a.        Create a map of my food.

b.       Discuss bananas

2.       Make changes at the grocery store – using the Sobey’s “What is In Season?” guide.

a.        Challenges – kid’s tastes.

3.       Research local markets

a.        talk to a local butcher

b.       Challenges – inflation and food prices of local food.

4.       Plan meals with local in mind.

a.        Challenges – My perception is that there is limited variety from local, and that will mean that I have to purchase some food that is not local. Is that acceptable?

5.       Give an example shopping list and a meal plan.

My Global Food Choices

Assessing my Food

It isn’t that difficult to see that I can be more sustainable in my consumption habits. The hard part is knowing what is ethically right to do. My tea comes from England, and is grown in Kenya (Ahmad Tea). They have many ethical practices, but the greenhouse gases generated to get the tea to me is a problem. Should I stop drinking tea? Or is there a more local option?

 

The Tea Solution? Check the Shop Local website. As it turns out, Millennia Tea is right in my back yard.

 

The Complication

 

We need to recognize that there is usually a local solution. But it comes with a literal cost. It is more expensive and buying more expensive products may be more sustainable for the environment, but it isn’t sustainable for me economically.

 

There is always a tradeoff, and this endeavor to personally engage in deep learning has brought me to a crossroads: What can I keep doing? What foods can I give up? What can I shift? And, what problematic purchases am I willing to accept?

 

I cannot remove all problematic products and continue to afford to live the way I do. From this realization, I need to take account of some of the other foods that my family consumes.

 

The Banana Problem

The first problem on my list: Bananas from Guatemala. They come from far away. That’s a problem. But is there an ethical banana I can buy? After a quick search through some blogs, I wound up on Global Citizen, and I have come to the conclusion that I should avoid buying them. They have a history of being ethically questionable. (Is There Such Thing As An Ethical Banana?, 2015) And finding a banana that is grown ethically in New Brunswick is all but impossible.

 

So, it looks like I will have to get my potassium and B vitamins from more potatoes. Good old New Brunswick potatoes and McCain french fries. It’s a good thing that the Atlantic provinces grow a lot of them.

 

And in the end, I won’t bore you with all my bad choices. Pouring through my cupboards and remarking at every bad decision would be like beating a dead metaphor. And trying to find an individual solution for each of the pantry problems is too cumbersome. So rather than try that, I am just going to plan a week’s worth of meals and see how close I can come to a local menu.

 

My Personal Solution

 

To help me with this, I found a tool provided by Sobeys. It is their “What’s in Season? Your Guide to Canadian Produce in the Atlantic Provinces” (What’s in Season?, n.d.) From their guide, I can easily identify the produce that I can use in my meal planning. The stuff will be in season, and grown in the Atlantic Provinces. I had never considered that creating meals that are sources as locally would be this easy. But there is one problem: Selection.

In winter – which is the season at the time of this writing – as far as fruit is concerned, I can access apples and cranberries. That’s it. Slim pickings. As for vegetables?  In New Brunswick we can get Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, garlic, cultivated mushrooms, Onion (red & yellow), parsnips, potatoes, squash, sweet potatoes, and turnips in season. That means Taco Tuesday will either have to be a thing of the past until early Fall - that’s when field tomatoes are available – or I will have to accept the fact that some of my meals will have foods from farther away.

I am learning that I won’t be able to be perfect, as I go along this journey of food discovery.

Either way, it looks like I will be roasting a lot of local chicken and stewing a lot of local beef and pork. In Quispamsis, we are lucky to have several local butchers. I have not used them very frequently for one important reason: price. The question is whether I can afford to buy meat locally, or will I have to compromise? It is a big question for a lot of people. And it brings me back to my earlier complication – will these choices be economically sustainable for me?

What can I actually afford to do? It is a question on a lot of people’s minds. So, what can you afford?

The answer is that we can afford to have a talk with our local butcher about our desire to eat as locally as possible. Butchers are willing to create meat boxes, or freezer packs. They are willing to help you shop in a way that works for you. That is one benefit of shopping with your local butcher – at least it is here in Quispamsis.

 

My answer to this problem was to stop buying meat at the supermarket and go instead to Kuinshoeve Meats. They have everything I need to buy local. Most of their meat comes from Sussex, New Brunswick, which is a forty-five minute drive from my house.

The Immediate Plan

I have to accept that I can’t immediately change every meal. My morning oatmeal and my lunch of chickpeas, cucumber, and tomatoes will have to stay the same, while I work to make an impact on our family dinners. That is something I can live with. Again, I have to remind myself that incremental change has the power to create lasting change. Dinners first, then lunches and breakfast. Then I can tackle the whole pantry one item at a time, while balancing affordability with locality.

And I'm going to use these cookbooks to help:

Here is my meal plan for dinners this week:

 

Monday:

• Roast Chicken – Recipe from Save with Jamie, by Jamie Oliver (Oliver, 2016, p.78). Chicken from Kuinshoeve Meats.
• Mashed New Brunswick Potatoes
• Boiled Nova Scotia Carrots

(NOTE: The spices and lemon are not local)

 

Tuesday:

• Chicken Lasagna – Recipe from Save with Jamie, by Jamie Oliver (Oliver, 2016, p.84)

 

Wednesday:

•      Beef and Ale Stew – Recipe from Jamie’s Food Revolution, by Jamie Oliver (Oliver, 2009, p.180), Beef from Kuinshove Meats. Ale from Foghorn Brewing Company, in Rothesay, New Brunswick. I chose Golden Grover English Pale Ale.

(NOTE: The celery was from an old bunch of celery I had been regrowing in a glass and the can of NO NAME brand diced tomatoes was bought at Superstore, but it is a product of Canada.)

 

Thursday and Friday:

Leftovers.

Reflection:

All in all, I didn’t do terribly. I also didn’t fully succeed. There are too many things that we are used to buying that come from too far away. I found Tim Tam biscuits come from Australia. That is too far for cookies to travel. As for spices, fruits, and veggies. I don’t know how to deal with a lack of tomatoes in the winter. I cook too many recipes with them.

The Brightside: The three meals we made were hearty. My wife and kids ate them and they lasted us all week. I can see making them again, but the problem is that I need to find a new set of meals for this coming week and I will undoubtedly have trouble finding ways to source everything locally in the middle of February in New Brunswick.

As an example of this, I can’t make my lunches as they are if I source them locally. There aren’t any locally grown cucumbers in any of the local markets. I have decided to continue to buy some vegetables out of season because I am trying to cut down the amount of meat I eat. For the last month, I have been eating two vegetarian meals a day. I started this after watching Before the Flood, 2016. In the film, Gidon Eshel, Ph.D, a research professor of environmental physics at Bard College states that one of the biggest changes we can make is cutting the amount of beef we consume. I’m proud to say that I’ve done that.

 

I started eating oatmeal in the morning made with oat milk, the better of the milks according to a TED-Ed video titled “Which Type of Milk is Best for You?” (O'Sullivan & Cunningham, 2020).

Then I added a vegetarian chickpea and cucumber wrap that my son wanted to try – he’s been trying to cut down on his meat intake too.

 

All in all, I think I did well. I have learned about which foods are available in season at my local supermarket. I’ve branched out and found a new butcher to get local meats, mostly raised in Sussex, New Brunswick. And, I found frugal recipes in a new recipe book – Save with Jamie, so that I can use one dinner and cook from the leftovers again and again.

 

All of these things will help me to eat more locally, cut food waste, and reduce the overall amount of meat I eat each week. Those are all important steps that I would not have taken.

 

I’ve also learned that I have a long way to go in my purchasing habits if I am going to shrink my global food-consumption footprint. I just need to tackle this problem one item at a time. I’m going to fix my tea consumption next, but I’m not sure my coffee habit can handle it.

 

My original plan of action had a step six:

• Use the almanac to plan a garden to offset some of those purchases.

a.        Measure my garden space.

b.       Plan my garden in a diagram.

 

I will make plans for that step in the spring. I even found a planting calendar for my area on this website – 2023 Planting Calendar – Old Farmer’s Almanac.

 

I’ll get there. It is all a matter of intention, process, and refinement.

 

References:

Appian Way Productions, RatPac Entertainment. (2016). Before the flood. Retrieved 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCKEFbBmadg&t=4787s.

Fullan, M., & Langworthy, M. (n.d.). A Rich Seam How New Pedagogies Find Deep Learning.

Is There Such Thing As An Ethical Banana? (2015, July 27). Global Citizen. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/is-there-such-thing-as-an-ethical-banana/

Oliver, J. (2009). Jamie's Food Revolution: Rediscover how to cook simple, delicious, affordable meals. Hyperion.

Oliver, J. (2016). Save with Jamie. HarperCollins.

O'Sullivan, J. J., & Cunningham, G. E. (n.d.). Which type of milk is best for you? - jonathan J. o'sullivan & grace E. cunningham. TED. Retrieved February 28, 2023, from https://ed.ted.com/lessons/which-type-of-milk-is-best-for-you-jonathan-j-o-sullivan-grace-e-cunningham

What’s in Season? Your Guide to Canadian Produce in the Atlantic Provinces. (n.d.). Sobeys Inc. Retrieved February 25, 2023, from https://www.sobeys.com/en/articles/whats-season-guide-canadian-produce-east/

Wohlleben, Flannery, T. F., Simard, S., Billinghurst, J., & Simard, S. (Suzanne). (2016). The hidden life of trees : what they feel, how they communicate : discoveries from a secret world (Billinghurst, Trans.; English edition.). David Suzuki Institute