In Social Studies this week we made a visit to the local Scotmid store in Prestonpans to investigate how many Fairtrade products are on sale for us to buy. Before the October break we had been finding out about Fairtrade and what it tried to do. We had looked at the kind of foods that were sold under the Fairtrade system and the countries from which they originated. We had spent a fascinating lesson dissecting a Fairtrade coconut from the Caribbean and looked at a variety of seeds, vegetables and fruit with Fairtrade status…we even discovered the joys of the butternut squash!

Today, however, it was the local shop that was being put under our investigative eye – and we have to say it came out on top!

We walked to the shop with Mrs Binnie and Mrs Torley and were armed with a clipboard on which we could tick off any Fairtrade product on sale. Remarkably, for a store so small (in a fairly small town) we found evidence of around 20 Fairtrade products. These included:

• coconut
• banana
• white wine
• rose wine
• red wine
• dark chocolate
• milk chocolate
• white sugar
• brown sugar
• cereal bars with cranberry
• cereal bars with raisin
• cafetiere coffee
• instant coffee
• Earl Grey tea
• Clippers breakfast tea
• honey
• strawberry jam
• shortbread
• chocolate sauce
• peppers

We were amazed by the number of items with a Fairtrade symbol on and spent a busy hour writing down the name of the food, it’s country of origin, the price and weight (if applicable). We will be using this information next week to plot out another map of the world using our Scotmid foodstuffs as labels on each country.

The countries that the food stuff came from included

• Colombia
• Kenya
• Mexico
• Turkey
• Ghana
• South Africa
• Argentina
• Chile
• Costa Rica
• Brazil