Have students bring clean food labels from home. Each student will only use one label, but they should all bring several to ensure that everyone will get to work with a label from a different product. Go around the room and have them read their product’s ingredients to the class. Before you begin, reassure them that it’s okay if they have a hard time pronouncing some of the ingredients. As they read each one, write it on the board; whenever an ingredient is repeated, tally a mark by it.
In the end, you’ll likely have a very long list and you’ll see by the tallies which ingredients are most common. Do you know what these ingredients are? Have the students come up to the board and circle ingredients they are familiar with (likely things such as milk, sugar, and wheat). What’s left? Now it’s time for some food label forensics. Find out what these things are, what they’re doing in your food, and what they might do to your health. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has s food additives safety program. At www.cspinet.org/reports/chemcuisine.html you can find a comprehensive list of these unpronounceable ingredients and what sort of health impacts might be associated with them.