Name: ____________________________________ Date: ______________ Period: ______
Print pages 1 to 3 for every student. Page 4 is the food picture bank for cut-and-glue and for the grade 6 version. Page 5 is the distance table for the grade 8 stretch.
[Sal: check the chart once against the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets availability calendar or a local farm stand list, and fix any month that is wrong for your part of the Island.]
Part 1. What grows in New York, and when
Key: F = fresh from a New York field or greenhouse. S = stored from an earlier harvest and still New York grown. blank = not available from New York that month.
| Food | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apples | S | S | S | S | F | F | F | F | S | |||
| Asparagus | F | F | ||||||||||
| Beets | S | S | F | F | F | F | F | F | S | |||
| Blueberries | F | F | F | |||||||||
| Broccoli | F | F | F | F | F | |||||||
| Cabbage | S | S | S | F | F | F | F | F | F | S | ||
| Carrots | S | S | S | F | F | F | F | F | F | S | ||
| Corn (sweet) | F | F | F | |||||||||
| Cucumbers | F | F | F | F | ||||||||
| Eggs (from NY farms) | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F |
| Greens (greenhouse) | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F |
| Lettuce (field) | F | F | F | F | F | F | ||||||
| Milk and dairy | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F |
| Mushrooms | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F |
| Onions | S | S | S | F | F | F | F | F | S | |||
| Peaches | F | F | F | |||||||||
| Potatoes | S | S | S | S | F | F | F | F | F | S | ||
| Pumpkins and squash | S | S | F | F | F | F | S | |||||
| Strawberries | F | F | ||||||||||
| Tomatoes (field) | F | F | F | F | ||||||||
| Tomatoes (greenhouse) | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | F |
Circle eight foods above and write the season for each here:
| Food | Season it is fresh from New York |
|---|---|
| 1. | |
| 2. | |
| 3. | |
| 4. | |
| 5. | |
| 6. | |
| 7. | |
| 8. |
Mark three storage crops on the chart with an S. (A storage crop is picked in the fall and kept in a cool building for months.) Write them here:
- ____________________ 2. ____________________ 3. ____________________
What has to travel to get here? Write four foods that never appear in the chart above, because they cannot grow in New York:
- ____________________ 2. ____________________ 3. ____________________ 4. ____________________
- * *
Part 2. The four trade-offs of buying local
Write one plus and one minus for buying local in each row. A plus is a reason to do it. A minus is a real cost of doing it.
| Trade-off | Plus (a reason to buy local) | Minus (a real cost of buying local) |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | ||
| Taste | ||
| Availability | ||
| Jobs |
Food miles means the number of miles a food traveled to reach you. It stands in for the fuel, the trucks, and the days. Write the honest note your teacher said out loud:
Local is not automatically better, because ___________________________________
Part 3. Build two meals
Use the chart. Every meal needs a protein, a grain, a vegetable, and a fruit. Label every item with its source: L = local (New York), S = state or nearby state, N = national (somewhere in the United States), G = global (another country).
The January meal
| Part of the meal | What I chose | Source (L, S, N, G) |
|---|---|---|
| Protein | ||
| Grain | ||
| Vegetable | ||
| Fruit |
How many items are local? ______ out of 4
The July meal
| Part of the meal | What I chose | Source (L, S, N, G) |
|---|---|---|
| Protein | ||
| Grain | ||
| Vegetable | ||
| Fruit |
How many items are local? ______ out of 4
The hardest item to place in January was ______________________ because ___________________________________________________________________________.
Part 4. Your decision
Pick one food you actually eat. Would you pay one dollar more for the local version? Answer using all four trade-offs.
My food: ______________________________
| Trade-off | My reason |
|---|---|
| Cost | |
| Taste | |
| Availability | |
| Jobs |
My decision: I would / would not pay a dollar more, because ______________
Exit card
3 foods that grow in New York: ____________, ____________, ____________
2 months when almost nothing grows outside here: ____________, ____________
1 question I still have about local food: ____________________________________
Page 4: Food picture bank
For cut-and-glue and for the grade 6 version. Print, cut apart, and glue into the meal tables instead of writing. Each box has the word and a drawing of the food.
| apple | egg | milk | potato |
| cabbage | carrot | onion | squash |
| bread | rice | pasta | oatmeal |
| chicken | beans | cheese | yogurt |
| tomato | broccoli | lettuce | cucumber |
| strawberry | blueberry | peach | banana |
| orange | grapes | corn | mushroom |
[Sal: your printer, your pictures. One clip-art image per box is enough, and photos of the real items from your store work better.]
Page 5: Grade 8 stretch, the distance table
Rough one-way distances to Long Island. Use them to estimate food miles for three items in your January meal.
| Food | Where it usually comes from in winter | About how far |
|---|---|---|
| Apple (New York) | Hudson Valley or western New York | 150 to 350 miles |
| Potato (New York) | Upstate New York storage | 200 to 300 miles |
| Milk | New York or Pennsylvania dairy | 50 to 250 miles |
| Egg | New York or Pennsylvania farm | 50 to 250 miles |
| Cabbage (New York) | Upstate New York storage | 200 to 300 miles |
| Tomato (winter, field) | Florida | about 1,200 miles |
| Tomato (winter, greenhouse) | Ontario, Canada or Mexico | 500 to 2,500 miles |
| Lettuce (winter) | California or Arizona | 2,300 to 2,800 miles |
| Strawberry (winter) | California or Mexico | 2,500 to 3,000 miles |
| Banana | Guatemala, Ecuador, or Costa Rica | 2,000 to 3,000 miles |
| Orange | Florida or California | 1,200 to 2,800 miles |
| Rice | Arkansas, Louisiana, or California | 1,300 to 2,800 miles |
| Wheat (for bread flour) | Kansas, North Dakota, or Montana | 1,300 to 2,000 miles |
| Coffee | Brazil, Colombia, or Vietnam | 3,000 to 9,000 miles |
My three items and their food miles:
- ______________________ about ____________ miles
- ______________________ about ____________ miles
- ______________________ about ____________ miles
The hard question: Name one case where the food that traveled farther is the better environmental choice. Explain the reasoning in two or three sentences.
Teacher key
Part 1, storage crops: apples, potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, cabbage, and winter squash all carry an S in the chart. Any three of those count.
Part 1, foods that must travel: bananas, oranges and other citrus, coffee, tea, cocoa, rice, olive oil, pineapple, mango, avocado, cane sugar, most nuts, black pepper and most spices. Any four count.
Part 2, sample trade-offs:
| Trade-off | Plus | Minus |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Money stays in the local economy; buying in season is sometimes cheaper at a farm stand in August | Usually costs more per pound, and a small farm cannot match supermarket pricing |
| Taste | Picked ripe and sold within days, so flavor and texture are better | No taste advantage at all for storage crops in March; a stored New York apple is not better than a fresh Washington apple |
| Availability | You can find out exactly where it came from and sometimes who grew it | Almost nothing fresh is available here from December to April; hours and locations are limited |
| Jobs | Supports local farm jobs and keeps farmland from being sold for development | A small farm employs fewer people than a distribution network; the jobs are seasonal |
Part 2, the honest note: local is not automatically better, because a greenhouse heated all winter can burn more fuel per tomato than a truck bringing tomatoes from Florida, and because transport is often a small share of a food's total energy use compared to how it was grown.
Part 3, a realistic January meal: eggs or milk or a New York cheese (L), bread or oatmeal (N, because the wheat and oats come from the Midwest even if the bread is baked nearby), cabbage or carrots or potatoes from storage or greenhouse greens (L), and an apple from storage (L). Three of four local is the best a student can honestly do in January, and that is the intended result.
Part 3, a realistic July meal: eggs or chicken (L or S), bread (N), corn or tomatoes or cucumbers or lettuce (L), blueberries or strawberries or peaches (L). Three or four of four local.
Common error to catch: labeling a January strawberry or a January corn as local. Point at the chart, not at the student.
Part 5, the hard question, sample answer: a tomato grown in an unheated Florida field and trucked 1,200 miles can use less total energy than a tomato grown in a New York greenhouse heated through February, because heating a building all winter costs far more energy than a shared truckload of produce does per tomato. The reasoning students should show: compare how it was grown, not only how far it moved.
Scoring: the handout is daily work, scored complete, partial, or missing. Look for eight foods with correct seasons in Part 1, all eight items labeled in Part 3, and a reason in all four rows of Part 4.