NSF Learning Programme
Food for Thought
We took part in the Learning Programme as part of this year’s Norwich Science Festival. The Norwich Science Festival is a fantastic event full of exciting and fun-packed activities and workshops, the Learning Programme occurs a few weeks before the main festival and is dedicated to events for schools, colleges, youth groups and home-educated learners, designed to inspire future scientists!
This year we offered our Food for Thought sessions to School Groups and Home Educators. The sessions focused on food miles, seasonality and local produce to get participants to think about how the choices they make as consumers can have an impact. After all, we all have to make choices, particularly around the food we eat and our choices as consumers really do have the power to shape the world we live in!
Food miles is the term used to describe the distance food is transported from the place it’s produced to the end consumer. The effect of food miles is measured by the amount of CO2 emissions produced. In this workshop we looked at how our food is transported and considered choices consumers can make to reduce their food miles. Pupils at St George’s Primary School then went a step further by designing their own pizzas and discussing which pizza toppings are the most food mile friendly.
One home educator followed up their Food for Thought Session with a trip to their local supermarket: “We went to the supermarket following the session and managed to buy everything from Norfolk apart from grapes (we chose Namibia over South Africa) and the carrots were from Notts!“. What a brilliant way to put what they had learnt into practise.
These sessions were based on our Food Miles Resource from the Conscious Consumers Project. If you’d like to learn more or have a go at the resources yourself, make sure to check out our Conscious Consumers Resources over on our Learn page. The Norwich Science Festival is returning from the 11th – 18th February 2023, make sure to stop by and visit us on the 12th February 2023 at The Forum for Food and Farming Day!
Thank you to everyone that took part in our Food for Thought sessions, we hope you enjoyed them as much as we did.