Chapter 6 Student Activities

Twenty-Four-Hour Recall Activity

When nutritionists and nutrition anthropologists study what people eat, they often use a method called the “twenty-four-hour recall.” The recall asks participants to think about and list everything they have eaten over the past day.

Make a list of everything you have eaten and drunk during the past twenty-four hours. Who grew or raised these foods? Who prepared them? How and where did you get these foods? Many of you will not know where your food came from (except knowing it came from a cafeteria or supermarket). But where do you think each item was grown? Where was it processed? Who prepared it? How much of your diet is a result of industrial agriculture?

Your Ecological Footprint Activity

Consider how your day-to-day life impacts the environment by considering your personal ecological footprint. There are sophisticated algorithms that can calculate rather precisely how big your ecological footprint is compared to those of peasants in India, or Indians in the Brazilian Amazon. But for this activity, think about how your daily activities release carbon into the atmosphere, burn energy, consume food, and consume consumer goods. Now take three of these and think about the less-than-obvious ways your life affects the world’s resources.

A Thought Activity: Key Environmental Problems

Consider some significant environmental problem that you are aware of, preferably one you have thought about. What factors are preventing people from fixing or solving this environmental problem? Are there laws that could entirely or partly solve this problem? Why don’t lawmakers simply make laws to fix the problem? What “special interests” stand to benefit from not passing the new laws? How do they benefit?