3.5 Food Resources

Essential Idea

• People in different parts of the world have very different access to food and go about producing it in different ways.

• The manner in which people produce food is often linked to their cultural values and social systems.

Assessment Statements

• 3.5.1 Outline the issues involved in the imbalance in global food supply.

• 3.5.2 Compare and contrast the efficiency of terrestrial and aquatic food production systems.

• 3.5.3 Compare and contrast the inputs and outputs of materials and energy (energy efficiency), the system characteristics, and evaluate the relative environmental impacts for two named food production systems.

• 3.5.4 Discuss the links that exist between social systems and food production systems.

Key Vocabulary

• Global food supply and distribution

  • Inputs vs. outputs

  • Materials vs. energy

  • Intensive vs. extensive agriculture

  • Commercial vs. subsistence

  • Monoculture vs. polyculture

• Efficiency of food production systems

  • Terrestrial vs. aquatic

• Social systems vs. food production systems

Notes

Learning Activities

Food Resources

Try these questions to practice communicating your thoughts and responding to IB prompts.

Go Fish

This activity introduces the Tragedy of the Commons as it explores sustainability within the fishing industry.

Supplemental Readings

What Do We Really Know About Roundup Weed Killer?

This article (15-20 mins), written by Elizabeth Grossman and published by National Geographic (Apr.23, 2015), examines the pesticide Roundup and its affects on the environment and human health.

Save the Humans

This article (10-15 mins), written by the musician Moby and published in the Huffington Post (Sept.29, 2014), outlines some of the issues associated with eating meat. It states, "we don't have a famine problem; we have a livestock problem".

This (hilarious) video outlines the problem of food waste in society and the need to reexamine how our food production systems provide us with food.

This video is a full length film examining the industrial food production system and its affects on our health and our planet.

This video outlines the issue of overfishing and some of the strategies that have been put in place to protect our fisheries.

This video outlines the issues with fishing deep water species that tend to have low reproductive rates as a result of their environment.

**Graphic video content.**

This video examines factory livestock farming and how the choices we make at the grocery store have a huge impact on animal health and our environment.

This video examines the different labels we see on our food ("cage free" vs. "free range" vs. "pastured", etc.) to better understand where our food comes from.