Geography and Food Technology?

Geography teachers have shown enormous creativity in marketing their subject and pointing out its relevance to so many other curriculum areas. The use the Internet has enabled adventurous geography teachers to bring previously unheard of resources into the classroom, from live news feeds through to animated diagrams of processes in action. Forging links with other curriculum areas has been a tradition among the humanities areas such as History, PSE and RE, and more recently we have been encouraged to work closely with Citizenship.

Recently I came across an interesting website that is still new and finding it's feet. Www.biscuit-recipes.co.uk is a free site providing, not surprisingly, biscuit recipies. What attracted my attention though was the world wide distribution of their recipies. I've seen many American schools making the link between Food Technology and Geography, but I wonder how many UK schools have a close working relationship between the two subjects?

Thinking about it, there should be plenty of areas to work together. Geographical questions arising from FT lessons could include 'where do those ingredients come from?, and 'why are they produced there rather than somewhere else?' , 'do you buy ingredients from supermarkets or specialist local shops?' or 'why do traditional foods vary in different locations?

Food technology questions arising from Geography lessons could include 'so where does all that rice go?' , 'what ingredients do primary and secondary industries produce?' or 'what's it like to survive on the typical diet of a low paid worker in an LEDC?

Links such as these would nicely link in with Citizenship issues too. For example how do supermarkets fit into the food chain? or how many people in the world have access to food and drinkable water?

 

The Geography Site