How Does Your Garden Grow?
December 2, 2004
The other day I received an email from my father, with a subject title that read “Geography Puzzle…it’s fun”. In the body of the mail was a link and the message attached warned that this type of fun was addictive. I went to the link and found both the subject and warning to be true. The link sends you to an online game called “Place the State”. To play the game, you are given a blank map of the United States and have to drag and drop each state, given to you in a random order, on the map within 50 miles or so of its correct location in the country. At the end of the game, you are given a percentage score and information on your error average in miles. The game is addictive - I can’t tell you how many times I have played it now, but it is rivaling Solitaire in my world. Achieving a high score in the game depends in large part on what states you are given first, but regardless, you’ll improve your knowledge of American geography every time you play.
Around the same time that I received the email from my father, I was chatting with a friend at work, who had seen Brussel sprouts on the stalk for the first time and was amazed. My friend is a food professional, and yet she had never seen Brussel sprouts on the plant, and I don’t think she is the exception. In general, we have lost touch with how our foods grow. Many of us, me included, could easily be stumped with a question on how certain foods grow – on a plant, on a tree, on a vine, underground? I think we’d also be stumped with the question of where our foods grow. That notion brought me back to Dad’s geography game. Wouldn’t a similar game with fruits and vegetables to drag and drop onto a map teach us a lot?
I started doing a little research into what particular states were providing a majority of various crops for the country.