Have you ever heard of ort? I never had. Last week I had the opportunity to travel with a very unique group of kids to northern MN on a class field trip to the Audobon Center of the North Woods. It was a terrific experience and a really wonderful facility, I highly suggest checking it out.
As a nature center, one of the goals of the facility is to increase kids’ knowledge of waste. After each meal, all edible food left on their plates went into a bucket labeled “ort.” There was much speculation on what ort actually meant, but for our purposes it meant food that had been wasted. The staff then weighed the labeled bucket after each meal and a colorful chart on the wall measured how much ort there had been at each meal.
I have to say that the kids’ response to this chart was amazing. Dinner consisted of conversations about whether or not kiwi peels were edible (the staff did not weigh inedible food such as bones or peels of oranges) and the kids were seen eating such things as ketchup and syrup with their spoons to avoid having it go into the ort bucket (not at the same meals, mind you). There was no reward if the ort level went down, but there were groans and encouragement to do better if it went up. The kids were obsessed. They discussed it at other times of the day, they discussed the weight of milk and water (both ort worthy) and they encouraged each other not to take more food than they could eat. But most of all, they ate their food with nary a complaint. It was almost as if they were being tricked, no longer did they worry about what they were eating, they just ate it.
This pointed out a few things to me. First, kids can be motivated by some really strange things. Second, they don’t need a shiny reward to become motivated. Third, they really will eat just about anything. Finally, kids can monitor their food levels just fine by themselves. They knew how long it would be until the next meal and they knew how to ask for just the right of food to satisfy themselves with no adult intervention. Who knew?
By the way? Twice the ort levels were less than a pound, once they were down to 6 ozs. There were 60 people eating lunch that day. Oh, and ort means morsel of food. What a cool word for a simple concept.