GOOD MANNERS

Good manners = polite and respectful behaviour.

To respect our neighbour also means acting in order that everyone can have the same means of satisfying the basic needs to survive and it entails, among other things, to respect and take care of the environment.

The environment is not ours and we all have to undertake ourselves in its protection in order that all people, today and in the future, will have the opportunity of enjoying its resources.

Among the several themes concerning “good education” toward the environment, we have chosen the one regarding food-related problems because this is one of the studying topics of this school year.

Therefore we have adhered to a WWF project.

In the limits of only one planet: education to alimentary susteinability

These are the topics we have dealt with:

• Food and resources

• Food and biodiversity

• Food and health

• Food and consumer society

Food and resources - Alimentation in the world is based on a series of steps:

1. Food production, both of animal and vegetable origin;

2. Transformation;

3. Transport;

4. Distribution;

5. Consumption;

6. Waste disposal.

RELATED ISSUES:

•Energy use (water, oil ecc.), that pollutes the atmosphere.

•Use of synthetic chemical substances that alter the ecosystems equilibrium.

•Excessive exploitation of natural resources leading to the extinction of several animal species.

Each family can reduce the consumption of oil and the emission of greenhouse gasses following these nine steps:

1. Choose local products to avoid long transports.

2. Choose seasonal fruit and vegetables to save conservation energetical costs.

3. Try to buy directly from the producer avoiding all those intermediate passages that often imply useless transports.

4. Choose loose products without packages.

1. Choose family-sized packs to reduce the packing charges.

2. Make group purchases to decrease transport costs.

3. Reuse shopping bags or use the biodegradable ones.

4. Avoid the use of plastic glasses and plates that burn energy and pollute the environment.

5. Always do waste separation in order to allow the energy recovery processes obtained from them.

Consume local products:

The trasport of products from far-off areas increases the oil burning and the emission of greenhouse gasses

Some reason to buy locally:

• To defend our agriculture.• To strenghten the producing communities.• You know what you're eating (… or at least you should).• To defend the landscape.• To enhance biodiversity.• You can eat fresh foods.• You don'have to go far away.

Food and biodiversity - It's important that people, to breed only one animal species, do not destroy other species, because biodiversity is an endless food source provided that it is protected and hold on in its integrity.

Food and health - Diet plays a relevant role both as a health protection factor, and as a risk factor for many pathologies.

For a correct diet it should be good to follow the alimentary pyramid, it is a model that graphically represents a group of useful rules to manage your food habits.

It is based on the consumption of vegetables, mainly cereals, better if whole wheat, fruit and vegetables. In the higher higher block we find milk and dairy foods, better if lean, meats and

fish, to get to those foods with the highest content of saturated fats and sugars. Fish and fresh fruit are suggested for the intake of the needed unsaturated fats.

Food and consumer society – Food distribution is not well balanced worldwide

today, despite the production abundance, more than one billion of people live in

starving conditions because the economy of our planet is based on a strong

disparity.

What can we do to plug this gap?We can follow a sustainable diet being awarethat food is the result of a series of eventslinked each other, that have effects on environment, society and economy. We have to guarantee that in the next decades food will be a resource available for everybodyand so we have to protect the environment alsopaying attention to what is behind the food weeat.

For example, who eats meat exploits natural resources four times more than who doesn't. Each year, in Italy, 230 tosando people die for food-related diseases. Cardiovascular diseases, obesità and some kind of tumors are strictly related to an excessive consumption of animal food.

Eat fruit and vegetables (better if organic): the cycle of bovine meat production is responsible for 18% of world greenhouse gas emission, and it's also one of the major causes of deforestation.

All food-related processes turn out waste products

Waste separation is the most economic way to manage your garbage

Use natural products that do not pollute the environment

Waste separation salvages and regenerates the product increasing its value, and burning less energy in the process of recycling. It respects the environment because doesn't leave the burden of waste disposal to the nature.

Do waste separation: it is the most intelligent and important contribution you can give to the environment you live in.

How will we carry on our project?

• We will prepare a questionnaire about alimentation to see if in our families we have “sustainable” food habits and if they take care of the problems we have dealt with above.

• We will collect the answers and represent graphically the data obtained, in order to reason about it.

• We will build a board game that will help us to test what we have learned about the topic.