Welcome to the website for our Big Picture South Burlington group project "You Are What You Eat."
During the first four weeks of high school at Big Picture South Burlington, students choose an intensive group project to work on during this "orientation term." The goal of our project was both to learn how to learn through exploring a topic in depth through a variety of sources (interviews, books, newspapers, documentaries, and field time visiting with relevant organizations), and to produce a quality product that can show what and how we learned.
Our two essential and guiding questions for our project were:
What do we need to know in order to eat healthy?
and
What are the societal, environmental, and economic effects of the food choices we make?
We developed our Group Project Learning Plan from these essential questions, and created a set of experiences and resources we would use to explore them.
We began by watching together the movie King Corn and reading excerpts from The Omnivore's Dilemma in order to explore what it looks like to deeply investigate the topic of where our food comes from, and in the process learned a lot about the industrial food system. We then ventured to the Intervale Center for a service-learning project gleaning kale and green beans from Arethusa Farm for food shares that would be given to low-income families. We received a behind-the-scenes tour of City Market in downtown Burlington in order to study the food supply chain for conventional food, locally-source food, and organics - both large- and small-scale. We also spoke with Hunger Free Vermont in order to understand the dynamics of food access - and lack thereof - even in a state as agriculturally rich as Vermont.
With these experiences charging us to think about our food, we launched into independent and small-group investigations, based on our individual interests. These investigations are summarized in the five main categories at the top of this website.
In addition to the website, we also worked with the staff at the cafeteria at South Burlington High School to prepare two similar meals for the Big Picture South Burlington students. One meal used all conventional ingredients and the other featured local and/or organic ingredients in order to do not only a comparison of taste, but also cost and "food miles" traveled to get the food to our plates.
Enjoy the website and follow the links to more resources on the right for more information about the understanding where our food comes from.
