Thursday, February 6, 2014

Food Shipments and Their Global Repercussions

This farm class we had a discussion about the distance our food travels and it’s repercussions globally. We had four fruits: avocados, kiwis, apples, and mangos. We recorded for each fruit where it came from, how far it traveled, and if it grew here in Alabama. We measured the distance the fruits traveled with a map with the scale of 750 miles to the centimeter and used that to calculate the distance each fruit had traveled to reach us. We also had sections on our paper  where we recorded if our ability to import food from long distance has a positive or negative effect on the environment, price, nutrition, variety/choice and labor around the world. We then checked our answers for the section of our questions. After that we had  discussion about the positive and negative affects of our ability to to import food from around the world and shared our answers from the second set of questions. we decided that it had a negative effect on the environment because of the added pollution from the extra transportation needed to get all that food  to us. It makes food cheaper so it has a positive effect on price. It has a negative effect on nutrition because the food loses nutrients as it travels and is less healthy than local food. It has a positive effect on variety/choice there really isn’t much up for debate there. It has a positive effect on labor because it creates thousands of jobs around the world but if you buy local you would be supporting local jobs. If you buy food from far away the company you buy from might mistreat or underpay their workers. That is what we did in farm.

~Trevor Otis, Upper Elementary



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