The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle has come under attack for being too greedy. The award-winning teachers and authors of Mission:Explore have renamed the larval character as The Very Wasteful Caterpillar for leaving too many leftovers.
“The tale of the caterpillar munching its way through a fictional diet of a single sausage and fifteen other kinds of food is one of waste. Clearly Carle’s caterpillar is not aware of its environmental impact, but kids should think about this forgotten side of the story” explains Daniel Raven-Ellison of The Geography Collective. “One of the activities in our forthcoming book labels the caterpillar for being wasteful and challenges children to investigate how long it takes for different types of food to waste away”.
“We’re making Mission:Explore Food to help kids and indeed many of their parents learn about growing, harvesting, cooking, eating, waste and soil. Too few children understand where food comes from and how to eat both healthily and ethically. This book will help children to discover food in playful ways while tackling these issues.”
Other missions in the book challenge children to grow and eat cress mazes, forage for food, identify endangered fish, make their own ketchup, get as far as they can on a banana, try and map taste to their tongue, investigate how their diet changes their poo and build soil zoos.
Mission:Explore Food is racing along behind the scenes, with people writing, drawing and designing away. We are big believers in giving back to our community and so we have decided that if we hit our target we’ll give away Mission:Explore Food Taster to every school in the UK.
Mission:Explore Food Taster is a version of Mission:Explore Food that will include 150 missions, activities and recipes. If we hit our funding target we’ll send a PDF copy to every school in the UK and make it freely available to download. Schools will be free to print missions activities and share the book with families. Mission:Explore Food Taster will be a book in its own right and include all of the chapters that feature in Mission:Explore Food.
Thanks to our supporters we’ve raised nearly £3000 so far in pre-orders for the book. We still have a long way to go though, and not much time to do it in! Please pre-order a copy or if you work for a school or business, help raise money for the print run by having us visit you! We’ll visit your school and spend an inspirational two hours exploring food with your pupils. We can give one or more talks, workshops or assemblies about food to any age group. We can focus on specific agreed learning objectives for any subject area too. Find out more and donate here.