Food journeys

All food makes a journey from its source to you the consumer. We buy food from a variety of shops and online deliveries straight to our door.

Different foods are prepared and packaged in different ways for our convenience.

In this article you can learn:

• what a food journey is
• where milk comes from
• how bread is made
• what food miles are

This resource is suitable for Health and Wellbeing for primary school learners.

In this video, we learn about food journeys as the Great Spoon explains where milk and bread come from.

Lots of us enjoy drinking milk and it is often added to other drinks and foods. But where does milk come from?

1. Mother cows make milk to feed their calves. When grass in a farmer’s field is eaten by a cow, the cow’s body uses nutrition from the grass to produce milk for their babies.
2. The farmer then milks the cows using a machine attached to their udders.
3. The milk is put into a vat and pasteurised.
4. Milk is then chilled to keep it fresh.
5. Another machine separates the cream from the milk. This is called centrifugation.
6. The milk is then ready for the last step of its journey, being bottled ready for transportation by lorry to the supermarket, shop or even straight to your door.

This slideshow shows the different steps in bread's food journey from farm to plate.

Did you know?

Grass is difficult to digest. Cows have a stomach with four separate compartments to process the grass they eat.

Find out how cows, and other animals, digest their food on Bitesize 2nd level Science.

Many of us like to eat bread - from toast to sandwiches. But where does bread come from? How does it get from wheat in a field to our plates?

1. Bread starts its journey as wheat grown in a farmer’s field.
2. Wheat is gathered using a machine called a combine harvester.
3. The wheat is now ready to be transported to a factory that will grind it into a smooth flour.
4. Flour is then mixed with water and yeast. These are the ingredients to make the dough for bread.
5. The dough is shaped and baked in the oven.
6. The bread is packaged and transported to the supermarket to be sold.

This slideshow shows the different steps in bread's food journey from farm to plate.

Did you know?

Some people can't eat normal bread because it contains gluten and some people are allergic to gluten. They can have gluten-free bread instead, which is made using different grains.

Find out more about food allergies here.

• Each of the steps above can be calculated to work out milk or bread's food miles.
• Food miles measure the distance a food has travelled to get to your plate using transport that produces carbon emissions.
• Some food travels from the farm it is grown on to a shop to be sold. Other foods travel to a factory first and then to a supermarket or shop.
• Food that is grown and produced locally is a more sustainable option for our environment.

Learn more about food miles: Sustainable food

Try this short true-or-false quiz to test your knowledge on food journeys.

In this article, we've learned where milk and bread come from but all foods take their own journey to get to our plates and lunchboxes.

Look at the food in your fridge, lunchbox, school canteen or think of your favourite meal. Can you find out where it was made?

Try figuring out its food journey or calculating its food miles. Can you map this out?

These guides can help you learn about and calculate food miles.