The challenge
Hello everyone. I'm Gordon Ramsay and welcome to Planet Create, where your ideas and creativity help solve global issues and today we’re looking at food, something I know very well. The United Nations hope to end hunger across the world, achieve food security, improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. Which all sounds great, but what does that have to do with us?
We all know how important food is and we need to survive, but not everyone has access to food and sometimes food gets forgotten and goes bad. Let’s be honest, we’re all guilty of leaving an old sandwich in the bottom of our school bag or finding those rotten bananas somewhere. Now, across the world we are wasting 2.5 billion tonnes of food every year. Come on, that's a lot of bananas.
I want to set you all a challenge. You're going to design a meal made up of leftovers to help prevent food waste. So get your cooking brains engaged and get those creative juices flowing. Think about the food that you see get thrown away at home or even some of the food that people don't eat at school. Are there any stand outs you can think of?
Potatoes, bread, milk, bananas and salads are the most wasted food items in UK homes, but there's so much more you could do with them. Could you make a smoothie from your salad? A potato pasta bake? Or even a delicious banana bread!
The big question is, how will you cook? Is it frying, baking, mixing, freezing? Trust me, the options are endless. Think about it, with potatoes alone you could boil them, mash them or even stick them in a stew.
How delicious does that sound? Honestly, I can't wait to see the leftover recipes you come up with and I may even try them myself. Good luck.
An astonishing amount of food is wasted around the world every day.
In this video, celebrity Chef Gordon Ramsay sets pupils the challenge of making a meal from leftovers to help reduce food waste and get children thinking about how they can be more resourceful in their day to day life, making small changes to help the planet. This challenges ties in with the UN Sustainable Development Goal number 2: Zero Hunger.
Teacher notes
Supports learning about: food and farming, cooking and technologies, sustainable energy use and well being.
Why not enable pupils to take their learning further and come up with some practical solutions?
Classroom ideas
You can adapt ideas to be a quick activity, an entire lesson or develop into a longer topic.
How much food waste do we generate at school?
Get pupils to brainstorm how to measure and record the amount and type of food waste in school. This could involve a survey of packed lunch boxes or interviews with the school kitchen.
Ask them to design a questionnaire to send home to find out which foods are mostly thrown away.
Contact your local supermarket to ask what happens to their waste food and tell the pupils your findings and discuss as a class.
How can we cook more sustainably?
Ask pupils to investigate different methods of cooking the same dish using a fair test. Which is best – gas or electricity?
Ask them to find out which cooking devices such as pressure cookers, microwaves and slow cookers, are the most energy efficient?
Research with pupils and make a solar oven – what could you cook in there?
These are just a few examples.
What are you doing in your curriculum and with which primary age group?
What ideas have you and your class got to meet Gordon’s challenge?
Curriculum links
England
Design and Technology: Cooking and Nutrition; Geography and Science.
Northern Ireland
Personal development and Mutual Understanding, The World Around Us.
Scotland
Technology: Food and Textiles, Social Studies: People Place and Environment.
Wales
Health and Wellbeing, Science and Technology, and Humanities.
Where next?
Animal hotel challenge with Chris Packham
Wildlife TV presenter and conservationist Chris Packham sets pupils a challenge to build a bug hotel, bee house or hedgehog home.
Health and wellbeing technology challenge with Alex Scott
Former footballer and TV Presenter Alex Scott sets primary pupils the challenge of inventing a piece of equipment or technology to improve health.
Backpack challenge with Steven Bartlett
Dragons’ Den entrepreneur Steven Bartlett sets pupils the challenge of making a backpack from recycled materials.
