ER GCE Portfolio

 Welcome as we finish up our first unit of our Food course.  A course on how food is grown scientifically and mathematically, and explored the ideas of people like Fukuoka and Charles Darwin.  We broke it down to the very micro nutrients involved in growing crops and even how they got there. One example is the nitrogen cycle, we learned how nitrogen in the air is taken in by plants during photosynthesis, which is eaten by animals that are broken down by bacteria when they die which brings it into the earth.  During the course we took trips down to the Plant Chicago where we explored some decomposers -  mushrooms and how to grow them. There we took our own cultures of blue oyster mushrooms and transferred them to a petri-dish to grow.   Spoilers the incubator was set two high and they didn't really grow that well, but i'm still trying to grow mine here at home.  Once we got back to school we tried to grow our own beans. they still need some time as they haven't propagated ye

Papaya Pete Welcome to our first unit of Food For thought! A class where we talk about the Anthropological and historical ideas that food takes us including where it came from and how that in turn informs us about ourselves. Did you know that corn has domesticated us? It turns out that what was once a grain has evolved and grown along side us to be more useful to us, because it turns out that being useful to humans has become the greatest evolutionary advantage ever! To add insult to injury corn is in just about any food you could think of now. Don't believe me? check the ingredients on the back of your Cheetos. Its in just one form or another.  During this class we traced back our roots as far as we could go to see what the different foods could teach us about where and who we came from.  We put all this info together in a colorful family tree. We also put together a map with the center of origin for almost every food crop with trade routes and the ancient civilizations that exist