Lab: Human Ecology
Lab Activity - Diet and Agricultural Demands
In this exercise, you will investigate how your own diet affects the agricultural demands of a country. You will do this by monitoring your food and drink intake for 3 days, and recording it on the attached activity sheet. At the end of this time, you will add up the number of calories consumed and find the average amount for each day. Most of your packaged food should come with some type of caloric guidelines. If it does not, a fairly complete listing of the calories of various foodstuffs can be found at http://www.thecaloriecounter.com/ or another similar site.
As best you can, you need to categorize the calories as coming from either plants or animals. For some things, this will be easy. A steak or a glass of milk clearly fall into the animal calories category, while a bowl of rice or a side dish of beans fall into the plant calories category. But what about plate of spaghetti with meat sauce? For this, you should try to separate the meat sauce into the amount of meat and the amount of tomato and other vegetables and then decide of calories for both. If you are in doubt, put the calories in the plant calories category. If you do this, you then need to realize that your land usage estimate might be lower than it actually is. After calculating your average caloric intake and estimating the amount of land that is needed to provide your daily intake, answer the questions on the activity sheet.
Questions
1) How does your average consumption of calories compare to the current American average of 2700 calories per day?
2) There are 314 million people in the U.S. If all of them ate like you did, how much land would be required for farming? Given the average American's caloric intake, which translates to 1.03 acres per person, how much land is required to meet America's food consumption?
3) China has 1.2 billion people. There is a total of 2.37 billion acres of land in China, of which only 710 million is of agricultural quality. If all of the Chinese had a diet like yours, how much land would be needed? If all the Chinese had the diet of the average American how much land would be needed? Is it realistic for them to eat this much, given their land limitations?
4) Why does it take so much more land to raise a calorie of animal-based food than plant-based food? (Think back to the first lab). In light of this discrepancy, do you think we face a food production problem or a food consumption problem?
Attachment:- Lab.pdf