How bad are bananas?
July 2024
Overall Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★
To buy this book, click here.
Why this book?
I recently picked this book up again, years after reading it for the first time. As I prepare to work on our KS3 climate change scheme of work, it seemed fitting to revisit the ‘carbon footprint of everything’. Despite the topic and density of information shared, this is a highly readable book and one that gave me plenty of food for thought ahead of revisiting how best to teach climate change.
For teachers:
In the introduction of this book, Mike Berners-Lee uses the language of a ‘carbon instinct’ to mean having a sense of the climate change impact of everything we do. I like this phrase and wonder if it could have value if used in curriculum design. Could an aim of teaching climate change at KS3 be to instil in students a ‘carbon instinct’? This made me recall some other recent thinking about the language of climate change, shared here.
Another highlight from the introduction is Berners-Lee’s discussion of whether carbon is like money. I am definitely guilty of launching into in-depth conversations about climate change without pausing to cover (or re-teach) the basics: what is carbon? What are the main greenhouse gases? This framing of carbon with its similarities and differences to money made me think of the value of using this comparison with older students- could this be a better way of starting discussions of the complexity of global carbon emissions?
In terms of my subject knowledge, I had 3 main takeaways from re-reading this book. For each one, I share how I’ll take this forward to our teaching of climate change. Please note, the page numbers related to the 2010 edition of this book.
1. Bananas are a low-carbon food. This is owing to the fact that they grow in natural sunlight (no hot-housing required) and that they are transported by boats because they keep so well. (p.27)
Before reading this book I actually assumed the opposite- that bananas were very bad for your carbon footprint. I’m not entirely sure why I thought this was the case but I’m happy to have learnt otherwise! I think this is an example worth explicitly discussing with students to show the complexity of the carbon footprints of our globalised lives.
2. As a rule of thumb, about half of the carbon impact of car travel comes out of the exhaust pipe itself. About 40% of the footprint, is associated with the manufacture and maintenance of the car. (p.66)
I find myself referencing electric cars more and more in my teaching but often find that students have very little knowledge beyond having heard that they’re more ‘green’. The fact that only about half of the emissions of a car come from the exhaust surprised me (I thought it was much higher) and so I want to make this explicit when discussing issues of sustainable transport so that students understand the nuances of electric cars and that simply switching from petrol to electric, whilst significant, is not the ‘perfect solution’ to mitigating climate change- as some seem to believe it is.
3. When 1kg of produce is being moved, a mile by air has more than 100 times the climate impact of a mile by sea. (p.83)
Whilst I knew that some food arrived in the UK by boat and some by plane, I didn’t realise quite how stark the difference in emissions was. Perhaps that explains my misconception around the carbon footprint of a banana! As Berners-Lee goes on to explain, when considering the carbon impact of food we need to consider how the food arrived in the country. Examples of food that are very likely, when out of season to have been air-freighted include mangetout, baby carrots, lettuces, shelled peas, blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries. Again, this highlights the complexity of the issue and links to the idea of explicitly discussing bananas with students for this reason.
Having re-read this book I’m now excited to start work on our climate change scheme of work and make some changes!
To buy the second edition of this book, click here.