Age group: Any

How long it will take: 60 minutes

What materials you will need: pens and paper, copies of the seasonal food calendar, copies of the ‘Food all year round’ sheet; if you choose to go out shopping, money and reusable carrier bags.

The aim of the activity: To think about eating locally produced, seasonal food.

Adapted and extended from activities for kids on the Countryside Foundation’s web site. Food calendar compiled from too many web sites to mention.

What to do:
One way to bring down your food milometer is to eat foods that are grown locally. In the UK, since we have seasons, this means eating foods that are ‘in season’. Most people have lost track of what foods are supposed to be available in which season, since technology like large scale hothouses and rapid, energy-hungry transport (you know you can get strawberries when Wimbledon’s on in July, but then you can get tasteless foreign strawberries in January, too).

What do you know about seasonal foods? Try going round the circle with each person saying a month of the year (in order) and a food that is in season then.

So the first person says “January – Cabbage,” the second, “February – cauliflower.” Venturers: try this without using the seasonal calendar. Are there any months you get stuck on? Can the group do this at all? Pioneers and Elfins could do this using the calendar, just as a quick warm-up.

Ask the following questions:
1. Which months of the year harvest the greatest variety of foods?
2. Which months of the year offer the least variety of foods?
3. Why do you think there is a greater variety of food ripening and being harvested in Q1? HINT - think about what a plant needs to live and grow and think what will help a fruit ripen.

If your group is a small one, you could go to a local large corner shop or supermarket (open when you meet) with your seasonal food calendar and look at foods on sale.

• Which foods are in season? Where have they come from?
• Where do the ones that aren’t in season come from?

Buy a basket of fruit and veg – only ones that are in season! Take it back to your meeting place and look at it all. What meals could you make from them? Would everyone be happy to eat meals only made from these foods for a whole month?

Planning menus is part of going away on camp or weekends with Woodcraft Folk. Divide the group smaller groups and give each the task of planning one of these menus, using seasonal foods as the main ingredients:

• A weekend away at a youth hostel in February
• A district Christmas or winter party in December
• A camp in August (just do a couple of days)
• A group night barbecue in June
• A group night barbecue in September
• A hike in April – some of the group will be making lunch for everybody in a pub or hostel kitchen that is on the way
• Invent another one or two using your own group’s activities, or change the months and see what happens!

Would everyone be happy to eat these menus? Were some of them harder to think of than others? Did something seem to be missing from any of them?

If foods are seasonal, how come we can eat so many of them all year round? Mostly, fresh fruit and veg that are not in season here are imported from places where they are in season – at great cost to the environment. Here are some other ways that we can eat all kinds of foods at different times of the year:

• growing different varieties
• storing food in cold stores
• freezing food
• pickling food
• bottling and canning food
• making jams and jellies
• drying food
• growing food in glass houses

Hand round the ‘Food All Year Round’ sheet that gives more information about these methods.

Not all foods are suited to all the ways of growing and storing. Ask the group to find 5 different kinds of fruit or veg suited to each of the ways (you could do this by splitting the larger group up into eight).

Would any of these preserved foods make the menus you made up better?

Some of these methods use more energy or resources than others (so are less sustainable). Which do you think would be the most or least environmentally friendly ways of preserving food? Which ones do people do at home? Which ones would they like to do if they knew how or had help to do them?

Do you ever have fresh food left over from camp? What do you do with it? Once upon a time in the early 1990s, the DFs had a huge surplus of grapefruit left over after their summer camp. They made delicious grapefruit marmalade and raised funds from selling the jars for many months to come!