The American Chemical Society will celebrate Earth Day on April 22, 2017. This year's theme is Chemistry Feeds Our World. I have gathered some resources related to food and cooking from ChemEd X in honor of the theme. I have also included links to other resources.
Two high school chemistry teachers have recently shared information and resources from food chemistry elective courses they have developed. First, Tracy Schloemer published a blog titled Developing a Cooking Chemistry Elective and followed it up a month later with Cooking Chemistry: Additional Resources. Later, Erica Posthuma-Adams published an article, Developing a High School Chemistry Elective, that outlines how she pulled together resources to design her elective course.
Fig. 1 - Food press from Developing a Cooking Chemistry Elective
In 2013, Tom Kuntzleman published JCE Classroom Activity #92: Testing for Iodide in Table Salt. The activity was originally published in the Journal of Chemical Education. Tom created a video of the activity procedure that includes a twist of his own. More recently, Tom has been experimenting with McCormick's new natural food dyes. He has written two blog posts Chemical Investigations of McCormick's Color From Nature Food Colors. Part 1: Sky Blue and Investigations of Chemicals in Natural Food Coloring. Part 2: Berry that include videos of some of his experiments.
Fig. 2 - McCormick's Color From Nature Food Colors
In 2012, I posted an activity that many of you might be familar with, Green Eggs Solubility Activity. I have assigned this as a take-home activity, but I have also used it in class.
Hal Harris is an avid reader and has written many book reviews for ChemEd X. One that stands out as a good fit for this year's Earth Day theme is What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained.
The American Chemical Society offers a wealth of resources on this year's theme as well as themes from previous years on it's page titled: Chemists Celebrate Earth Day (CCED) 2017(link is external).
You can also find lots of related activities by searching the ACS ChemClub resources(link is external).
Of course, a search of food related terms on the Journal of Chemical Education(link is external) site will yield a plethora of articles. Erica Jacobsen had compiled a list of food related JCE articles for National Chemistry Week in 2000(link is external) that offers lots of ideas.
If you are celebrating Earth Day 2017, I hope you will share your plans with our ChemEd X community.