The Nourish Curriculum Guide is a companion to the Nourish film.

Nourish opens with the question, “What’s the story of your food?” Responses to this question are woven throughout the video as it shows our food’s connections to a global community, the path our food takes from seed to table, and how our food choices can affect our health as well as people and places around the world. Through interviews with food experts such as Michael Pollan, Anna Lappé, and Bryant Terry, and with a variety of youth voices, the video suggests ways students can help create a better food system for themselves, other people, and the environment.

Synopsis of Nourish: Food + Community

The video includes the following chapters:

Connections

This chapter introduces the idea that all of our food involves a story, which often reveals a connection to the global community. It shows how some of our food is grown by local farmers and how some comes from producers halfway around the world. It suggests that, depending on what we eat, our food can either support local economies and preserve open space, or cause species loss and other problems.

Seed to Table

This chapter follows the path of two different crops–corn and tomato–from seed to a meal. Commodity corn, which is used as animal feed and in food additives, is the largest crop in the United States. The video shows how commodity corn is grown as a monocrop and requires chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and lots of processing to become food products. An heirloom tomato is a variety whose seeds have been saved and passed down through generations. In the video, the heirloom tomato is grown organically, sold at a farmers’ market close to the farm, and prepared by young people as part of a meal.

Vote with Your Fork

In this chapter, author Michael Pollan explains how the Western diet of processed foods was invented over the last 50 to 75 years and has created many health and environmental problems. He suggests that the food choices we make every day express what matters to us, and that through better choices, we can improve both our health and the environment.

Be the Difference

This chapter offers concrete ways that individuals can help transform our food system, such as asking questions about the source of food, finding out what grows locally, checking food labels, and joining an organization working on food issues.

Run time: 26 minutes

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