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Lesson plan: Unpacking the supermarket bag
From the Making a Meal of It! online
resource
Age group: 7 - 11
Aims:
To demonstrate the global diversity of the origins of the food on
our supermarket shelves.
To encourage awareness that many of the poorer countries of the
world are contributing towards feeding us.
What to do:
You will need:
Card, paper, string, scissors, drawing pins,
pens. A large piece of material or tablecloth for
each group. Photocopies of the worksheet:
The world in a supermarket bag – enough for one for
each group. An enlarged photocopy of a world map (You may
wish to buy a full-colour poster version of this a Peters Projection
world map to use as a focus for this topic. See Order Form.) Supermarket carrier bags for each group, containing
four to seven items of food including: pulses/grains; tinned
fish/fruit; coffee/tea; a packaged/processed foodstuff; a bar
of chocolate.
Try to make this collection from as wide a variety of countries
of origin as you can and include healthy/less healthy items and
cheap/less cheap items. Ensure that every item is labelled with
its price. (As many foods are now labelled only by bar-code you
may have to label the foodstuffs yourself.) Also make sure that
the students are able to work out where the product comes from,
from the label, country of origin tag, or your own labelling.
The foods contained in the ‘supermarket bags’ could
subsequently be used in a harvest festival collection or grocery
stall at a school fair.
Divide the class into groups of four. Give each group a photocopied
worksheet, pens, and small blank cards to label the food for display.
Ask each group to unpack their bag, record on their worksheet the
name of each food in the bag, how it is packaged, the country it
comes from, the brand name, and its price. They should then write
out labels to show the country of origin of each item and display
their items on the cloth. Each group should then present their foods
to the rest of the class.
Finally, help each group to find the countries from which their
foodstuffs originated on the world map. Countries should be marked
with a drawing pin and linked by string to the children's labels
of their foodstuffs. Bring the whole class together for reflection
on the session and to look at the range of countries from which
the food in their bags has come.
Discussion points:
Points for discussion could include:
How many of the countries are in the South? Why are many of our foodstuffs grown or produced
in the South? (One reason is that climate allows production of
fruit and vegetables for most of the year.) Which continents are in the South? (Africa,
Asia, Latin America.) Which foodstuffs in the supermarket bags
come from which continents? (You may have rice from India, tinned
fish from Indonesia, and fruit from Malaysia.Does the class know
that these countries are all in Asia?)
When talking about the countries of the South try to convey the
idea that they tend to be poorer than the countries of the North
but that there are poor and rich people in both North and South.
Fair Trade:
There is also now a growing demand by consumers for fairly-traded
products, including food products. More and more people want to
know that the tea or coffee or honey or sugar which they buy has
been produced without exploitation, and that the farmers who grew
or processed the product in the South received a fair price for
their work.
| ‘Why do I sell my cocoa to fair trade organisations?
Because they are honest and fair and do not try to cheat
us. They give me a good price and pay me straight away.
They also share what they make with us and every year
the farmers earn a bonus. So now we are better off and
can afford to spend a little more on the children’s
school fees and other basic things.’
Akasuwa, a Ghanaian cocoa farmer |
What is a fairly-traded product?
Oxfam Fair Trade Company uses the following criteria to check it
is buying fairly traded foodstuffs. The producers of fair-trade
products should:
receive fair wages; be able to meet to discuss important issues; not be discriminated against or exploited; enjoy reasonable working conditions; take care of the environment.
Curriculum links:
| England |
Scotland |
Wales |
| Geography:
- Use atlases and globes; collect and record evidence; to
recognise how places fit within a wider geographical context
and are interdependent.
English:
- Group discussion and interaction; scan texts for information;
draw on different features of texts to obtain meaning. |
Environmental Studies, Social subjects:
- People and Place - location and features of maps.
- Developing informed attitudes - the importance of interdependence
in a local and global context.
English:
- Listening in groups.
- Talking in groups.
- Reading for information. |
Geography:
- Use atlases and globes; collect and record evidence; to
recognise how places fit within a wider geographical context
and are interdependent.
English:
- Group discussion and interaction; scan texts for information;
draw on different features of texts to obtain meaning. |
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