An Earth day Trip to the grocery store

Today we went to the grocery store. Since we are studying Botany on Your Plate, I decided that we would continue our food education even on Earth day. So after making a fun Earth Day stamp design, the kids and I headed out to meet friends at Fred Meyers to calculate exactly how far away our food comes from.

I made a chart that said "Food Name", "Where was it grown?" and "Miles". We haven't gotten to the miles part yet... that is tomorrow. But we were able to get all the info for the rest of the chart via the grocery.


This is Cyan and Alex with their friend Jacob and Autumn, filling out their charts. You notice the two 'almost readers' put the stickers from the fruit onto their charts. It worked GREAT! So if they couldn't read the label correctly, the label was right next to their words and I was able to help really easily. One of my better ideas for sure. :)

The great thing about having a large grocery near you is that you can have two kids find the exact same item (in our case, onions) and have them be from two totally different places! (In our case, Texas, and then grown right here in Washington) It really brought the importance of reading labels home to my kiddos.

The second part of the trip we went to Terry's Berries, our local farm here, to find out where their food was from. And, me being the planner that I was, was thinking that it would all be from the west coast at least. I was wrong! I was shocked to find Bananas from Ecuador, and Lemons from Mexico there right along with the carrots from CA and the Apples (all varieties) from WA. It does show what a hard winter we had up here... but wow. I thought that more would be from our area. Of course, there were many more things from this area than at the big chain store... but the difference wasn't what I had anticipated.

When we got home, and after we had had some lunch, we sat down and looked at Google Earth for a general distance between where we buy our food and where it is grown. Now that was amazing! The kids loved watching the camera zoom across the world to stop on Chile, or Ecuador, or Mexico for each product we had picked.

All in all, a good lesson, and a GREAT day!