Curriculum Resource: Food Rules Animated with Actual Food

Regular readers of this blog know that Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, changed my life.  After reading that book, I dramatically changed what food I bought and where I bought it as part of my ongoing effort to reduce our family's carbon footprint.  I think it is an incredibly important book, and I urge everyone to read it in order to understand why our current food choices are not environmentally sustainable.

Pollan followed up that book and his In Defense of Food book with a guideline for what we SHOULD be eating entitled Food Rules:An Eater's Manual.  This distills his advice about what foods we should be eating, both for our own health and the health of the planet.

Now animators Marija Jacimovic and Benoit Detalle have created a short video of a talk on Food Rules that Michael Pollan gave.  His words are accompanied by a stop animation film using food itself to illustrate his points.....which I think is really kind of great.  

So if you haven't read the books, at least start the ball rolling by watching the following video:

Michael Pollan's Food Rules from Marija Jacimovic on Vimeo.

We are talking about these kinds of issues in our Healing Oceans Together environmental group/educational coop.   But the books themselves raise issues that relate to many different disciplines, including biology, physics, chemistry, economics, political science, history.  

I see these books relating to the posts I had last week about imagining the future and issues with STEM education.  They raise serious and potentially disasterous questions about our food production system, the breakdown of which could lead to our students' future in competing for food in their own version of a "Hunger Game."  However, Pollan remains optimistic about things we could do differently, and does provide do-able suggestions for making better food choices.  So, as Maria raised in the comments, it does make our high schoolers aware of potential problems in their future, but gives them reasons to hope and suggestions for things to do to improve the situation.

It is certainly a topic that can make many of these subjects very real to our students.  

The Most Adorable (and Tasty) Star Trek Tribute EVER!

We interrupt our regular educational programming with the following announcement:

CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT TODAY IS THE 45TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST STAR TREK EPISODE!!!!!!

Yikes!  I watched Star Trek as a child, and granted, that was 45 years ago, but still, somehow, it seems shocking....

But I've always loved Star Trek, especially the original series in all its cheesy and earnest glory.  My husband was more of a "Second Generation" guy (and, admittedly, the Borg is a great concept), but those characters never captured my heart the way James T. Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Uhuru, Sulu, and Chekov did.

Which is why I am so enraptured by this:

from Darla at Bakingdom.com, one of my new favorite blogs.

Can you believe she made the entire cast into cookies?  You can see them all up close on her post, along with details about her recipes and techniques involved in recreating everyone in flour, sugar, and butter.

Her entire site is filled with similarly creative pastries and other goodies.  Truly, her stuff is incredible.  I like to use food to enhance certain educational ideas and subject, like our Presidential Palate series of cooking a meal to represent the US Presidents, but I can't hold a candle to her when it comes to cookie- and cake-based tributes.

However, her tasty Star Trek reminders does make me think about incorporating watching some Star Trek into our 20th century history this year once we get to the 1960's.  The original series had a political agenda; Gene Roddenberry wanted it to support the anti-war, feminist, and pro-Civil Rights positions of the 60's counter culture.  And as I reported in an earlier post, actress Nichelle Nichols has a story of a chance encounter with Martin Luther King Jr., who called himself "the biggest Trekkie on the planet," and claimed that Star Trek gave people a concrete vision of how life could be if we were committed to equality and peace (well, not that there wasn't plenty of fighting in Star Wars, but the goals were always to forward peace).   The show was pretty radical for its time, especially with the racially-mixed crew and television's first scripted inter-racial kiss.  

So maybe I can justify revisiting some of my favorite childhood memories for academic purposes!