We're 3 students from the Okanagan who got curious about where our food actually comes from. After digging in, we learned the answer ripples much further than what's on our plate.
We thought we were studying lunch. We ended up tracing the way one small food choice ripples outward into a family, a neighbourhood, a valley, and the planet we all share.
The choice starts here. One lunch, one dinner, one snack. Small on its own. But every plate has a path it traveled to get here, and it shapes what comes next.
Our project connects to four of the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals. Each one shows up on every plate we eat.
When farms can sell direct to their community, fewer people go without and food doesn't rot in shipping containers. Local food systems feed the people who live closest to them first.
Every dollar at the farmers market loops back through the valley three and a half times. That's what keeps the orchards in the Okanagan, the markets in our towns, and a place worth living in.
Buying what's in season, in the amount you need, from a stall a few kilometres away cuts food miles, plastic clamshells, and household food waste — all in one trip.
The same salad, sourced locally, has seven times less carbon than the supermarket version. Multiply that by every household in this town and you have a climate result you can measure.
Pick a meal. Watch every ingredient trace its journey from soil to fork. Some travelled twenty minutes. Some travelled twenty thousand kilometres.
A myth we kept hearing: "Local food is expensive." We did the math on a single bowl of spring salad — and what we found surprised us.
We film every market trip on TikTok. Real prices, real food, real budgets — no filters and no scripts. Here's what eating well on a teen budget actually looks like.
@gorpcoreokngnNew market trip every Saturday. Recipes, budgets, and what's actually in season — all under a minute.
Follow on TikTokThe Okanagan changes every month. Eating with the season costs less, tastes better, and travels almost nothing.
Every dollar at the farmers market does more than buy lunch. It builds the place we live.
For every dollar spent at a BC farmers market, roughly $3.50 ripples back through the local economy. Compared to ~$1.40 at a national supermarket.
The Vernon Farmers' Market is a direct income stream for hundreds of small producers between Armstrong and Lake Country who can't compete on a grocery shelf.
Bring your own bag, buy what you need, skip the plastic clamshells. A typical market basket creates a fraction of the trash a grocery run does.
Kids who shop with farmers can identify three times more produce by name. Knowing where food comes from is the first step to caring what's in it.
Upload a photo of anything you're about to eat. Our AI identifies it, then shows you the supermarket version vs. the farmers market version, side by side.
Pick a sample or upload a photo to see the comparison.
Every pin is a real farm, market, or orchard within a half-hour of downtown Vernon. Tap one to fly the map there and see what's on offer.
Five quick questions. One letter grade. Zero judgement — just a snapshot of where your eating sits today.
Knowing matters. Doing matters more. Pick one thing you'll try this week and add your name to the ripple.
Choose one action you'll commit to in the next 7 days:
Real meals from real people in the Okanagan, graded by AI for nutrition and broken down ingredient by ingredient.
We started this project thinking we'd write a poster about farmers markets. We finished it realising that the way our generation eats is going to shape what the Okanagan looks like in fifty years.
— Leo Erdelyi, Tanner Carr & Jack Saxton
We're Leo, Tanner, and Jack — Grade 11 students at Kalamalka Secondary School in Coldstream, working through the Climate Action Ripple Effect (CARE) program. None of us are climate experts. We just got tired of being told individual choices don't matter and wanted to see for ourselves if that was true.
Spoiler: they matter. Especially when they're shared.
Catch our weekly market trips on TikTok — @gorpcoreokngn
The biggest lie about farming is that it's expensive to support. Five extra dollars a week from each household in this town would change what we can grow.
Sarah M.
Small-acre vegetable grower · Coldstream
If you're a student, teacher, parent, or just someone with a kitchen — this project is yours to share, fork, and remix.