Food impacts
Problem
The interactivity asks you to pair up the food items with the carbon emissions created by their production. The graphs showing the carbon emissions are fixed and you need to arrange the food type labels into the correct places.
Different types of food can have a range of possible emissions . This is because there are some conditions where producing the food has relatively low carbon emissions, and other conditions where the emissions are relatively high. For example, 250g of asparagus grown seasonally and locally has emissions of 270g CO2e, but 250g of asparagus airfreighted from Peru has emissions of 4.7 kg CO2e.
The graphs below show the low, average and high emission impacts of the different foods. When you think you have rearranged the cards correctly, pressing the submit button will show you which cards have been correctly placed. You can then rearrange the other cards and check again.
The data used in the task comes directly from the landmark Poore and Nemecek paper, Reducing food's environmental impacts (2018).
Getting Started
You might like to start by thinking about which foods might have very large, or very small, carbon footprints, and also which foods might have a wide range of possible carbon emissions.
You are not expected to get this right first time! Have a go, press submit, and then change some of the labels that are in the wrong place. Repeat this until all the labels are in the correct place.
Teachers' Resources
Students should not be expected, or expecting, to get all the labels in the correct place on their first attempt! Encourage them to change the ordering of the "wrong" labels after pressing submit, and iterate this process until they arrive at the correct ordering.
Students could discuss some of the reasons behind the wide range in some of the foods.
You can find out more information in this BBC article, which also contains a calculator to look at the impact of various items.
This problem is one of a collection designed to develop students' carbon numeracy; we hope it will encourage students to think about the issues surrounding climate change. You can find the complete collection here.
This problem also featured in an NRICH Secondary webinar in November 2021.