Food security: a topic for design and technology

At the beginning of the term my colleague, Beverley Lawe,  led a seminar for year 2 about ‘Food Security’, part of the module Design and Technology in Education and Society; today I followed this up by exploring with the students this topic's potential use in D&T. In this post I’m sharing some of our discussion, beginning with a summary of the topic and then presenting three possible activities in which food security could be used as a starting point. These activities use the NTU D&T curriculum model as a framework.

World diet

As the world population’s diet changes to reflect the perceived affluent diet of western countries, which includes meat as a staple element, there is a greater demand on arable land to produce food for the animals rather than for people to eat. The land needed to feed an animal which will be slaughtered is greater than the land needed to feed a person from vegetation (fruit, veg, wheat etc). Therefore we need to make some changes.

These changes could include:

• people eating less meat (Meat free Mondays campaign is an example of this)
• cultured meat (not meat but a simulation created in a test tube)

Power of the supermarkets

We had some debate as to whether it was the supermarkets driving this, or the consumer but this is the basic premise of our argument:

We focussed on the decreasing variety of different food products available (Aldi and Lidl are masters of this), for example: do you need a ‘finest’, ‘essentials’, and the branded versions of cream crackers? By restricting the choice they make the shopping experience simpler (no more dithering in the aisle) but there are consequences:

1. We come to expect the same ‘type’ of pasta/apple/cracker throughout the year, which forces the supermarkets to source some of these from overseas. This particularly affects fresh fruit and veg being imported and means we tend not to buy seasonal or local.
2. We become accustomed to a particular taste and always buy the same ones; the apple is an example of this. Golden Delicious apples have dominated the market for a while, they are easy to produce with a consistent smell, taste and appearance; consequently there is now an impoverished choice of apples on the supermarket shelves. Work by Hogg (see Kierl 2014, p.80) in 1875 recorded 475 varieties of apples.

I’m not claiming to have all of my facts correct here but I think I’ve captured the essence of what the students have remembered from Beverley’s seminar.

My question to year 2 was: How can this topic be relevant for D&T? We discussed this today and I proposed the following ideas using the NTU D&T curriculum model as a framework.

Mainly designing

A conceptual approach could be taken with the world diet; ask pupils in groups to use data about the increasing world population, its wealth and change in diet (I’m sure geography teachers could help out here). Ask some pertinent ‘What if..?’ questions to try and think about the future.  

From here pupils could identify some positive and negative consequences about the increased demand for meat. You could begin to explore these situations with them:

• How could we increase the amount of land for growing vegetation to feed people (or animals)?
• Why do people want to eat meat? What’s the alternative?
• How could we encourage people on a large scale to change their eating habits? I’ve deliberately suggested large scale as the idea isn’t in this activity to design and make a food product, instead maybe a campaign or programme.

Mainly making

This activity could start with familiarising pupils with the alternatives to meat, some already available (e.g. tofu and quorn), some in development (e.g. cultured meat) or just no-meat food products. To start with pupils could blind taste test food products that do not include any meat product, in groups with focussed questions.

The next stage could be to give groups a non-meat alternative to test and experiment with, e.g. boiling, frying, roasting, raw etc. This is an investigative part of making that is very successful with food.

Finally pupils could be asked to modify an existing recipe that contains meat, removing the meat component and replacing it with a alternative but not compromising on taste or appearance.

In this activity the design decisions pupils make are technical, constructional and aesthetic, they are not being asked to consider the market or the concept; this in my opinion is what makes it a ‘mainly making’ activity.

Designing and making

Starting with the power of the supermarkets as a concept and the ‘impoverished choice’ of different varieties of fruit and veg on the supermarket shelves (e.g. carrots or apples), pupils could design a marketing campaign for a local food supplier that specialises in a particular fruit or veg or a local speciality. This is obviously a seasonal brief, with different food produce being used dependent on locality.

All of these have a central component of Design and Technology in Society, the fourth component of NTU's curriculum model, allowing pupils to explore the consequences and possible solutions to this local, national and international food dilemma.

To many D&T teachers these activities are nothing new, but to some of our undergraduate trainee teachers they are, and a main aim of the module is to challenge them to think about how topics, such as food security, can be used in D&T lessons.

If you want to know more about food security Beverley asked year 2 to listen to a podcast from the BBC Radio 4 Food Programme.

If you want to know more about the NTU D&T curriculum model read the paper I presented with David Barlex in New Zealand last year, pages 214-218.

Reference
Kierl, S., 2014. Ethical Technological Literacy. In: J.R.Dakers, ed. Defining Technological Literacy. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.