Are you interested in where your food comes from? Are you educating about ads, trade or activism? Global Meal workshop helps to grasp the production and consumption of food, advertising and ad parodies. The free, ready-to-use presentation and subvertisements have been popular in developing cross-curricular projects and media literacy. Download the materials in Finnish and English here.
Besides our health and cravings, the production and consumption of food have many kinds of impacts on the environment as well as the people and animals that are part of food production. In the Global Meal workshop, food is examined through multi-sided exercises:
As consumers, we are affected by commercial communication, trends and politics of food but can also steer them into different directions. All of us can make an impact by making choices between products, participating in societal/critical discussion and affecting the decisions of companies and politicians.
The impacts of producing and consuming food are also about choices and solutions:
how can they be affected?
It is also essential to keep media literacy in mind, as ads are a substantial part of our everyday lives: public spaces, media and consciousness. Advertisers aim at affecting our decisions on what to buy in various ways, and hence we should create counter messages to their stories. One good way to participate in discussion is to learn to interpret and make subvertisements.
Subvertising is about actively seeking and presenting alternative meanings to advertising.
The material was developed and distributed in teacher trainings in 2017–2018 in the Global Meal project of the Association of Biology and Geography Teachers (BMOL) with Pro Ethical Trade Finland (Eettisen kaupan puolesta and me), WWF and Häiriköt-päämaja (Jammers HQ). Download the Global Meal presentation (modifiable slides), photos and the subvertisement gallery (vastamainosgalleria) at the bottom of this page here.