The biodiversity of your refrigerator: An exercise in food origins

Abstract

Students often have little idea of where the food they eat every day originates and which of their staple foods come from their ancestral homelands. By doing a quick, simple inventory of the origins of the foods and ingredients in their refrigerators, students can become much more aware of whether they are eating predominantly their native foods or the foods of their adopted country. This exercise ties into a series of pertinent topics of current concern: the global food supply, the distance food must travel from farm to table, nutrition, and changes of diets through history. The exercise was assigned to a class of nineteen students from ten countries (China, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Jamaica, Nigeria, Peru, Philippines, Puerto Rico, and United States) to fully test it. Although not statistically significant with this small sample size, one interesting trend that emerged was that students who had been in the U.S. longer were using fewer foods from their ancestral area and more foods from their adopted area (Northeastern U.S.), while increasing their food family diversity.