In lieu of taking a field trip to check out what happens to everything San Francisco throws away, we watched a great video in the classroom about the Recology San Francisco Transfer Station and Recycling Center. Students learned about how food waste gets moved off site and turns to compost over a 60-day period, how the contents of the blue bin are sorted and bundled, and how our trash is moved to a landfill site in Vacaville. We also learned about Recology’s artist-in-residence program and sculpture garden.
In the kitchen classroom, students filled their own individual glass jars with the food waste candy from the previous week’s prep to take home. All that citrus they juiced generated more than 1,000 pieces of candied citrus peel! Each table then played a game designed to challenge us to determine which bin to sort items into. For every item pulled out of a bag, we had to determine whether to place it in the green bin, blue bin, black bin, or whether it was inappropriate to place it in a Recology bin at all. The fourth and fifth graders easily sorted items like leftovers and clean paper into the correct bins, but had questions about items like broken glass, batteries, and cat litter, for example. Hopefully we all learned something by doing the activity together and can be ambassadors to the rest of our school community.
For our final meal together, we scooped the citrus sorbet mixed with the food waste candy into sugar cones and gave a toast to another completed Edible Social Studies unit. Each student shared their favorite lesson or lessons from our 10-week unit while we enjoyed the frozen treat in the cold, drizzly weather. For our final circle together, we shared an appreciation for an ingredient, a recipe, a classmate, or an experience. We closed with a quote from All We Can Save, the same book we read from in our first class this semester. Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says, “Science tells us that it’s not too late, but we have to pull hard, every day, together, to make a difference… You don’t have to know where we’ll end up. You just have to know what path we’re on.”
