Food from the Farm to Your Table Unit

 

The Food Industry Process

MMSD Standards Addressed:
Social Studies
  • Economics: Describe the difference between goods and services and identify the people who provide them.
  • Economics: Explain why people specialize in different occupations and describe how that specialization leads to increasing interdependence between producers and consumers in a community.

NCSS Standards Addressed:
  • Production, Distribution, and Consumption
  • Individuals, Groups, and Institutions

Goals of Lesson:
  • Students will understand what happens during the steps in the food industry process.
  • Students will represent a specific example of the steps in the food industry process from The Story of Miguel's Tomatoes.

Essential Question:
  • How does food get from the farm to our tables?

Materials Needed:

Procedures:
  1. Ask students what needs to happen for food to get from the farm to their homes.  Write their ideas on the white board.
  2. Ask students what agriculture is.  State that agriculture is farming (the occupation of cultivating land, raising crops, and feeding, breeding, and raising livestock (from dictionary.com)).  Explain that agriculture is the beginning of the food industry process.  Much of the food that is in the grocery store, some farmer, somewhere has grown out of the ground using the latest technology that he has.
  3. Explain that before farmers can grow the food they need to prepare to grow the food and this is the first step in the food industry process.  Reveal and explain the rest of the steps in the food industry process from the Steps in the Food Industry Process poster.  Ask students if they can think of examples of any of the steps.  Explain that the food industry is a very complex process and involves many specialized people and supplies (examples: agriculture supplier, farmers, truck drivers, food handlers, farm machinery, trucks, packaging supplies).  It also depends on a lot of factors (examples: weather, roads, economics).  (from http://www.feedingminds.org/level1/lesson2/obj1.htm)  Explain that all of these steps are connected and we depend on them as consumers to get a lot of the food we eat.
  4. Ask if students have any questions about the food industry process.
  5. Pass out a copy of The Story of Miguel's Tomatoes to each student and read the story out loud.  Students can take turns reading the story out loud if they would like to.
  6. Pass out a copy of the handout of steps in the food industry process from The Story of Miguel's Tomatoes to each student and briefly talk about each step, noting that they are slightly simplified from the Steps in the Food Industry Process poster, but involve the same things.  These steps are a different way of categorizing the steps.
  7. Pass out a copy of the handout of questions from The Story of Miguel's Tomatoes and a copy of the Picture process of the food industry from The Story of Miguel's Tomatoes worksheet to each student.  Tell students to answer the questions in their notebooks.  On the Picture process worksheet, they should also draw a picture from the story that represents each step.  Students will hand in the answers to the questions and their completed Picture process worksheet.
  8. Remind students that tomorrow we will be going to tour a local vegetable farm to observe a part of the food industry process.

Assessment:
  • I will formally assess students' understanding of the steps in the food industry process by collecting and reading their answers to the questions from The Story of Miguel's Tomatoes.  I will check to see that each person clearly described the process.
  • I will formally assess students representation of the steps in the food process by collecting and looking at their Picture process worksheet.