Lesson video

Hello, and welcome to another lesson with me, Mr Telfer, Mr T.

We're doing D&T Food Tech.

But it's a bit different today, okay? So let's see what's going on.

So today's lesson's all about minimising waste and we're talking about food waste and also packaging as well for the environment that we're living in.

A bit of theory today so we're going to need our pens and papers, our exercise books.

There is a practical and if you choose to do that you are going to need some scissors and a plastic bottle and a few other bits and pieces.

But we'll talk about that when we get there.

Okay, are we ready? Here we go.

Today, so we want to explore how we are going to minimise waste.

We're going to look at the five R's of sustainability.

Five, should be six but we'll talk about that.

How to improve your family habits and how we make our own composter.

Okay, so hopefully we have a fun day today.

Today's key words, feel like Sesame Street, food waste which can be used to describe any food that we don't consume, that we're going to discard or throw it away.

Microorganisms - so micro, tiny little organisms that spoil our food or ruin our food.

So micro means tiny or small and an organism is an organism.

So yeah, that's when we looking at things like bacterias, moulds, yeast, all the nasty things.

And the environment, that's the natural world that we live in and we destroy.

Huh-uh, terrible, bad humans, but yeah.

So we're going to look at food waste as our first topic this morning.

Here we go.

So throughout the UK, there's many different counties, there's many different councils and they all offer different waste disposal services.

So where I'm originally from, we used to get like garden waste, recycling and household waste, where our food waste wasn't really picked up.

Where I live now they pick up my food waste and my recycling.

So I got lucky, not everyone has that service though.

Before that service though, we had a problem because everything needs to go in the same bin.

Recycling, things we can't recycle, food, all in one bin, stank, terrible.

And the problem with that is because we wasn't separating anything as a nation, because we weren't separating our waste, it was hard for people to separate it so they just take it to the landfill, dump it all, okay? And that's really bad, stinks but we'll talk about that in a bit.

The problem with that though, is that food waste can actually be used beneficially to give us energy and we can use it as well to make things grow.

So we don't really want to just waste it, do we? So here's a quick question for everyone.

Food waste consists of about what percentage of landfills across the United States and the United Kingdom? Is it 91%, 9%, 1.

9%, 19%? So why don't you answer that quickly, let me hear.

91% - you're wrong.

It's 19%, okay? So 19% of the waste in landfills, sorry about that, is food and that's causing harmful emissions and greenhouse gases, okay? So all these foods that is buried, it is impacting our environment.

You know, the world that we are living in, we are ruining it for ourselves and our future generations.

Food waste, if you have a compost heap it stinks, okay? And it creates a gas called methane, which is really, really terrible for the world that we're living in and it has a massive impact on climate control.

Now today's lesson is not about climate control and we're not going to go into that too deep.

But if you want to go and research it, feel free, it's interesting, and you can start thinking about how you can change your habits and improve the world that you're living in, okay? Now, a lot of food that's going to waste we could actually feed the animals, not all of it, but some things you just don't feed to animals but a lot of it could be fit for animal consumption.

So what I want you to do now is have a think what food do you think that we could have that's wasted that we could actually use to feed animals? So, pause the video, jot down some ideas and we'll be back in a moment.

So maybe you wrote down breads and grains and we can think about feeding birds with that, obviously, you know, you may have some chickens in your backyard or take them to be the ducks even though they say you shouldn't give ducks birds, okay, don't give it to the ducks.

Give them sweetcorn, though, and grapes.

But anyway, they could use it to feed wild birds anyway.

Fruit and vegetables could go to a little petting zoo or a little farm.

Give them some apples, give them some oranges.

Have you ever seen a hippo eating a watermelon? It's amazing.

But yeah, so you can feed all the animals.

Those are meat, could give it to certain animals but a lot of waste meat you can use for maggot farms, which is absolutely disgusting if you don't like maggots or yeah, you feed the maggots, you get them big.

And then you give the maggots to other animals that eat the maggots so it's like, I could give my meat to some maggots, then feed my maggots to my lizards, if my lizard eats maggots, I don't know.

But yeah, there you go.

Yuckily.

Also with food waste we could make our own fertiliser or compost, whichever you want to do.

Now, because food waste is biodegradable, which means it naturally breaks down with using its own bacterias and a bit of air and stuff, it naturally breaks down over a period of time and it creates an organic material, nice substance that we can put back into the earth and help things to grow.

It's like that circle in life, isn't it? ♪ It's the circle of life ♪ ♪ And it's.

♪ Classic, anyway, moving on.

So, food storage and food waste naturally go hand in hand.

You know, if we aren't storing our food correctly or properly, we are only going to spoil our food.

So by doing it correctly, storing things correctly we're going to preserve the life of our food and we're going to minimise the food waste which is what we want to do, okay? We really want to minimise food waste.

So in our house, we've got three types of.

I'd like to believe we've got three types of food storage.

Pause the video and have a quick discussion.

Think about what those are, and then we'll unpause it, check your answers and then we'll move on.

Nice stuff.

So if you said chilled, frozen or dry storage, you would have got it correct.

So chilled storage, that's our fridge.

Our frozen storage is obviously our freezers and our dry storage, well that's going to be our cupboards or our pantries if you've got one.

You know, where it says store in a dark, cool place? That's the dry stuff, okay? A few things to make sure we keep it in mind as well.

Worth you checking when you get a chance.

Your fridge should be between zero degrees and five degrees celsius.

Now people are like, "Zero degrees, that means it's a freezer?" No, because a freezer should be at minus 18 degrees or a little colder, okay? So the reason why we've got to keep our fridge and our freezer that temperature is because that is where the bacteria is slowed down or stopped.

At six degrees, seven degrees, 8 degrees, bacteria can grow, but if we keep it below five, we slow it down, slow it, slow it, slow it down.

It's important, danger zone, okay? Now also, the best before dates.

I know some people, I won't say no names, Mum, who really says best before dates are like, "Oh, we've got to get rid of it." No, we don't.

Best before dates is the shop saying this food is great, but if you eat it after this day, it might not be fantastic.

So things such as breads, cakes, I haven't got any thoughts right now, you can though.

So, but yeah, bread has a best before date, you know, it might be better to eat before the 26th but it could probably last till the 29th.

So quality of the products is going to diminish whereas a use by date is a bit different.

That's the stuff you don't want to eat.

So we're looking at things like prawns, I love prawns, I really do, but if prawns say use by the 12th and it's the 13th, chuck them away, that's what I do anyway.

Not keeping them, dangerous.

So use by dates, you know, that can harm us if we don't follow it.

Best before dates we can still use them or probably try and modify our recipes and do something with them, okay? And the last one, I love this, is date rotate.

So what I mean by date rotate, if I go shopping today, my new stock goes to the back of the cupboard and my old stuff comes to the front.

So I get that cycle going on, yeah? So we date rotate.

If you go to the shops as well, here's a little secret for you, if you go to the shops, any High Street store, not High Street store, you go to the supermarket, go to the fruit section and I bet you you could put your hand to the back of the fridge, that date's going to be lasting longer than the products at the front.

Go and do that for me, you go and do that.

Yeah, there you go.

So what I want you to do now is pause this video, make sure you wrote down these points.

And then when you get home you can actually check these things as well.

So check your fridge and freezers temperature and check that your cupboards have been date rotated.

So press pause now and I'll see you in a minute.

So now we're going to look at a task that I call the A-Z food list.

Literally, what you are going to do is create a list from A to Z of different foods, probably in your house that you've got or that you've eaten or that you like, it could be anything, okay? So for example, I've used apples and bread to start off with.

You could do more than one letter per, well one, , more than one food per letter, So I could have apples and anchovies if I wanted to.

I want you to explain how you think this food is best stored.

So apples they're actually better chilled in a fridge, which I didn't know.

I keep mine in a fruit bowl but apparently they last longer in the fridge.

So I might start putting them in the fridge.

And bread, obviously we know we can keep it in a dark, cool place so it should be in the cupboards or in a breadbin.

It's actually really bad to keep it in the fridge apparently.

Hmm, learn something new every day.

And then once you've done that, I need you to think about is this product suitable for freezing? 'Cause you know, if we freeze the product we can actually prolong it's life, so we don't have much food waste.

And then we can talk about what we could do with it as well.

So if my apples are going bad, I could mash them down and make apple crumbles, apple pies, apple sauce.

So think about the alternatives you can do with these ingredients as well.

Does that make sense to everyone? Yeah, I hope so.

So press pause now, compile your list and then we'll come back in a moment and we'll progress.

See you in a moment.

So now we're going to look at recycling packaging.

Now, luckily for us most packaging is recyclable.

We've got cardboard, some plastics, foils.

So we're all right, whether it's food or consumer goods, electronics, toys, there's always some packaging and we can recycle it.

but not everything is recyclable, okay? So what I want us to do before we go further, I want you to write a list of items, food packaging that you think is recyclable and what you think is not recyclable.

Pause the video, write your list and we're going to go through some answers in a moment.

So items we could recycle, I anticipate most of us would have said glass jars, tins, like a tin of beans, cans that you drink out of, plastic bottles, you know, get our water in, nice and healthy, cardboard tubes and packaging, so like the box of foil or the tube on the inside of cling film, toilet roll.

so on and so forth, all recyclable.

Now products that we can't recycle, crisp packets, who knew? Crisp packets, can't recycle them.

Mixed material food pouches or cartons such as a carton of milk, carton of juice, or those big pouches with the food inside.

So basically mixed material, they've got the outer coating, a plastic on the inside and the foil as well.

It's hard for them to separate those materials, so rather than trying to separate them and process it they just go to waste, they can't be recycled.

Cling film on food and trays, it's a type of plastic that they can't recycle yet.

And polystyrene packaging, very tricky one.

It's not worldwide able to be recycled, the process is, you know, not every country's got the ability to do the process to recycle it.

So even throughout the UK, some councils will accept it, some councils will reject it, but often, more times than not, it's not actually recycled, it's taken with the recycling, but it's not actually recycled, okay? So do yourselves a little favour, if you've got any of those give yourself a tick, if you haven't got them, write some down now.

Press pause if you need to and then we're going to carry on.

So now we're going to look at how we, as great human beings and you know, the future, how we can minimise food waste and packaging waste.

Because like I said, it's down to us at the end of the day.

You know, we are the ones in charge of this.

So the first thing we need to start making sure we're doing is throwing out food properly.

So if we keep things where it's supposed to be we're going to actively minimise it spoiling and wasting.

Write a list to prepare your portions of meals and use all the ingredients.

Now, not everybody does that.

I don't do it all the time but sometimes by planning and preparing, you'll go to the shops and rather than buying a pack of onions and throwing away six, you just buy one onion, you know? So you know what you're using and you're going to use everything to avoid wastage, save you some money as well, to be honest.

Use more ingredients in your meals to avoid waste.

Now that's an interesting one.

So rather than me saying, "Oh, I can only use one onion." I can add an onion and a carrot and some broccoli because I'm not going to use that tomorrow.

So, you know, add more ingredients.

Be creative with your meals, have fun.

Make sure you use your food by the waste, waste, wait, waste.

Make sure you use your food by the right date, okay, to avoid waste.

And that is the use by date.

The best before date we can work with it but the use by date, make sure we're doing it so we don't have to waste the food and there we go.

Be creative.

I said that earlier, be creative with your meals.

You know, don't necessarily follow a recipe, but if I did, add some more things in, creative.

So now we're going to look at the five R's of sustainability.

Originally it was three, and over the years it's been developed to six, but some areas use seven, eight or nine, nine R's, you know? In technology, we use six R's, but one of them is repair and we're not going to repair food or waste so we're not going to really talk about that one today, As I'm explaining these, if you want to write them down, it would be great or you can come back and revisit them later on, okay? So the first thing we need to be doing to make a conscious decision to improve our environment is reducing things that we do.

For example, when people went to the store and was buying loads of different foods that they could not physically consume or ingest in time, it went to waste.

And also if you reduce your purchasing, you have to use things which avoids waste.

Does that make sense? Good, okay.

Rethinking, so when I say rethink, to me it means double question what we're going to do before we do it.

No, we question.

yeah, okay? So if I buy something I could think about what happens to it thereafter so does this go to a landfill, is it recyclable, could I do something else with this product when I've finished buying it so the packaging maybe, could I use it for something else? So on and so forth, okay? Recycle, so we know what recycling is.

Separating things, getting them sent back to the factories where they process it and turn it into a new item.

Reusing, so I just briefly touched on it, could I reuse a container, could I reuse a tub, could I reuse a jar that, sorry, had something else in it, could I use it for something else thereafter? So could I put some dry pasta in there, or my rice for the storage or even a pen pot or a flower pot, you know, you can be creative with it.

And refusing.

So by refusing what I mean is if we go to the store, we could refuse to buy fruits, vegetables, meats, dishes that have already got that cling film on, because remember, that cling film, we can't recycle it.

So we can refuse that and we can get fresh, loose pieces that we can put in, you know, something that is recyclable whether that's a foil or our old bags or a reusable bag, so on and so forth.

And also we can refuse plastic bags because if we refuse plastic bags, they stop making them.

They stop making them, we stop putting pollution into the environment, we look after the world, so win/win.

It's a process, it's not going to be overnight.

It's a process but this is definitely things that we should be looking at.

Hopefully you wrote these down by now.

If you haven't press pause, finish writing your notes and then we're going to move on to your next task.

Okay, so for the next task, what I'd like you to do is turn your household into a five R family.

So we've looked at the five R's of sustainability already.

I want you to make a rule for each one of those that you and your family is going to adhere to and then week by week or every fortnight even, it's up to you, I want you to guys to review it and see if you guys are actually making any progress or a positive impact on the environment, the world that we're living in today.

This will be something that I'd really like to see you share later on and the Oak Natural picture as well.

So press pause, let's complete this task, think about the rules.

And then when we come back, we'll do a practical.

So welcome back to another True or False question.

Nice one.

So earlier we spoke about landfills and food being buried and the harmful gases and the smelly ones as well that it produces.

But the question is composting our own food waste will cause methane gas as well, is that true or false? Yeah, it's actually false, okay? So because compost is an aerobic process which means the air is flowing around or over it, it means it doesn't create the harmful gas because that's built from the pressure of being buried under the ground and it's not being able to escape.

Get it? Now, holding onto that thought, you are going to make your own composter today.

Practical.

So in today's practical to make our own composter, first thing we're going to do, you should have a bottle.

So the first thing we're going to do is take our bottle, our two litre bottle, make sure we took off the labels.

make sure it's clean on the inside and you or a responsible adult, I just need to cut around the top, just like so, okay? And then we're going to take the pin, I'm going to take the pin and we're going to pierce holes in the bottom.

And we're going to make and pierce little holes in the bottom for our drainage.

Once we've done that, we want to place it in the tray to make sure that things don't leak out.

Next we're going to add some soil, just some nice fresh earth from outside, and we're going to add some garden waste.

So I've got some leaves there.

Now I'm wearing gloves because these are already wet and dirty but it's totally up to you.

Now, because mine are already moist, I'm okay, but realistically at this point I can spray, add a little bit of water, not to drown it, just to keep it moist for the bacteria, then we're going to add our food waste, okay? So I've got some eggshells here, I've got some onion and I've got some tangerine, oh yeah.

So my waste, these aren't going to waste.

and I'm literally just going to stir that in, like so, and that will give a chance for the bacteria to have loads of different things for it to start catching onto and eating, okay? Now I can put my top of my bottle back in there, like so, and that will act as a funnel, so if I have a spray in there, the water just drips into it, see how that works? Beautiful.

Now what I need to do is take this and put it somewhere where it can get some light, a window or when it's not in use, you just want to cover it over with a towel like that.

Now every day, you want to go back and give it a stir, you can add some fresh food to it every day.

And remember, it's going to take time to see this decompose but once it does, you can go and put it in the garden or put it in a flower in the house.

Oopsie, put it in a flower in the house and watch your flowers grow beautifully.

So that is how to make your own composter.

Whaa! So hopefully you made enough notes during my demonstration of how to make your own composter.

If not, you can always go back, watch it again and make more notes as you're going along.

Now, I challenge you to make your own composter at home.

Make sure it's a two litre bottle, or if you're really lucky, you can use a five litre bottle.

You know, the big square ones.

They're really, really interesting.

And remember it is going to take a long time to see the bacteria and the compost breaking down into food, but stick with it, it is worth it.

So you have made it to the end of Food Technology.

Don't cry, I know it's a shame but today's lesson like I said, it was all about you saving the environment and things that we can do to improve it.

I would really, really, really relish the chance to see your work online.

So if you could share with @OakNational, that's our Twitter, and hashtag it, you know what it is #LearnwithOak, LWO, I look forward to seeing your composters at the very least, because mine's going to be on there.

So hopefully I see you in another D&T lesson.

Adios.