HW - 5/8/13

Your homework is to continue to work on and prepare to complete Assignment 32 tomorrow in class. See below.

Assignment #32 - Understanding Organic Foods

Aim: Scholars investigate the qualities of and misconceptions associated with organic foods in order to make claims about organic foods being part of public school lunches

Introduction

The big question that we will use to investigate and try to evaluate organic foods and the organic food industry is: Should public school lunches contain organic foods?

Some background information about public school lunches and where they come from…

The National School Lunch Program is a federally assisted meal program operating in over 100,000 public and non‐profit private schools and residential child care institutions. It provided nutritionally balanced, low‐cost or free lunches to more than 31 million children each school day in 2011. In 1998, Congress expanded the National School Lunch Program to include reimbursement for snacks served to children in afterschool educational and enrichment programs to include children through 18 years of age.

The Food and Nutrition Service administers the program at the Federal level. At the State level, the National School Lunch Program is usually administered by State education agencies, which operate the program through agreements with school food authorities.

Generally, public or nonprofit private schools of high school grade or under and public or nonprofit private residential child care institutions may participate in the school lunch program. School districts and independent schools that choose to take part in the lunch program get cash subsidies and USDA foods from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for each meal they serve. In return, they must serve lunches that meet Federal requirements, and they must offer free or reduced price lunches to eligible children.

Procedure

1. Before doing any further reading or investigation, answer the following question as honestly and completely as you can, “What is organic food?”

2. Brainstorm what information you would need to know about organic foods in order to answer the big question. Develop questions or a list of factors/characteristics of organic foods that you could investigate.

3. Investigate the readings found here and here and/or Chapter 9 “Big Organic” from The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. See the guide on the screen to help you navigate the lengthy chapter.

4. Revise/refine your answer to #1 and develop a better answer to the question “What is organic food?” Think about including any misconceptions that you had, examples of what is or is not organic food, etc.

5. Answer the big question, Should public school lunches contain organic foods? Support your claim thoroughly. Develop a counterclaim and address it.

NOTE: If it helps you to form and support a claim to the question, then assume that school districts that choose to offer organic school lunch options would receive a proportionate, fair increase in the amounts of their reimbursements from the USDA.

Understanding Organic Foods Rubric

	Mastery – 4	Proficient – 3	Satisfactory – 2	Needs Revision – 1
Claim	States clear, well-reasoned claim and counterclaim	States clear, well-reasoned claim	States a logical, but vague claim	States an illogical or indefensible position
Support of claim	Thoroughly supports claims with several detailed, convincing, specific reasons/pieces of evidence as well as refuted counterclaims	Thoroughly supports claims with multiple detailed, specific reasons/pieces of evidence as well as attempts at forming counterclaims/ refutations of them	Supports claims with multiple detailed, convincing specific reason/piece of evidence	Supports claims with reasons/ evidence that are not convincing due to lack of detail, specificity, or clarity OR not having enough pieces of evidence to support each claim
Demonstrates knowledge of class material	Very consistently demonstrates deep knowledge of related material by correctly using vocabulary and explaining examples clearly.	Consistently demonstrates knowledge of related material by correctly using vocabulary and explaining examples.	Demonstrates knowledge of related material by using vocabulary and explaining examples, but with some errors.	Does not demonstrate sufficient knowledge of class material through errors or lack of usage/ explanation.
Writing conventions	Writes elegantly and in a sophisticated manner while very consistently adhering to spelling and grammar conventions.	Very consistently adheres to spelling and grammar conventions.	Consistently adheres to spelling and grammar conventions.	Mostly adheres to spelling and grammar conventions.