Where Does Your Food Come From?
What you need
Paper or index cards, pens, a map of India big enough to pin things to (a world map too, if you have one), string or wool, and tape.
What it is for
To find out where your own town's food actually comes from, and what it costs — in distance, in diesel, in who gets paid — to arrive here.
The manual states these. What it does not state is not here.
How it runs
The teaching sequence as the manual gives it.
-
01
Send students out in pairs to the nearest place food is sold — the sabzi mandi, a kirana shop, the thelewala at the corner, the ration shop. Any of these works. A small town has more to look at here than a supermarket does. -
02
Each pair picks three things. One loose and unpacked: tomatoes, onions, a bunch of methi. One packed and branded: biscuits, namkeen, refined oil, a tetrapack of milk. And one they eat every day without thinking about it: tea, salt, dal. -
03
For the packed item, read the label and copy down the manufacturer's address and any place name printed on it. For the loose item the label is a person — ask the vendor where it came in from, which mandi, and how long ago it was picked. Write the answer in the vendor's own words. If nobody knows, write “nobody knew”. That is a finding, not a failure. -
04
Back in class, put the map up and pin each card to the place that item came from. Use one colour for places students are sure of and another for places they are guessing. -
05
Run the string. One end on the card, the other end on your own town. Do the loose items first and the packed ones after. -
06
With a big group, turn the string-running into a round. Before each string goes up, the pair reads out its item and hides the origin; the other team guesses which state it came from, and a correct guess wins a point. -
07
Then stand back and look at the shape on the wall. The short strings and the long strings sort themselves, and the sorting is almost never about what the food is. It is about whether somebody put it in a packet.
Talking about it
Discussion points, worked examples and the handouts the manual prints with this session.
Points for discussion
- What does the map actually show? Not that far food is bad. It shows how much of what you eat has been through a factory, and how fast the distance grows the moment something gets processed.
- What does a shorter journey buy? Less diesel and less cold storage. Food picked closer to ripe, because it did not have to survive the truck. And fewer hands between the field and the shelf, which usually means more of the price stops with the person who grew it.
- Pick one long string and try to shorten it. Is there a local version — oil from a kolhu instead of refined oil bottled somewhere nobody can point to, a vegetable that is in season instead of one that is not, loose dal instead of a branded packet? Some strings cannot be shortened. Say which ones, and why.
- If you were the one buying for your house, what would you say to the kirana owner or the mandi vendor to get more local produce on the shelf? Say the sentence out loud in class. It is harder than it sounds, and saying it is the actual skill.
Where this comes from
Bridge the Gap is a compilation. This is what the manual records for this session.
The manual prints no source for this session. It is published here as Swechha has used it, adapted over years of classroom work; if you recognise its origin, tell us and we will credit it.
Before you start sets out where the compendium as a whole comes from.
Next
Where to go from here.