Activity: Can eating lower on the food chain affect available energy?

1. Activity: Can eating lower on the food chain affect available energy?

2. According to Conservation International… • Eat lower on the food chain – it's good for the planet. • As poet-essayist-farmer Wendell Berry poignantly noted, "How we eat determines how the Earth is used." The American diet is notorious for the high percentage derived from animals, which stands in sharp contrast to most people in the world whose diets are overwhelmingly plant-based. A meat-based diet requires up to ten times the land area to feed a person relative to a plant-based diet. • Much of the 13 million hectares of tropical forest lost each year is converted to agricultural uses (including land for cattle and animal feed), permanently destroying essential habitat for biodiversity while releasing more than a billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. And not only is terrestrial biodiversity habitat being lost to conversion, but also aquatic species are threatened by animal-based feed production diverting water from and dumping wastes into watersheds. • Additionally, the large, and still-expanding human consumption of marine fisheries is a major threat to marine biodiversity. At present, fish and other aquatic resources provide less than one percent of the food calories, and five percent of the protein calories, consumed by the world's population. Yet, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that, already, 70 percent of global marine fish stocks have reached or exceeded biological limits for commercial exploitation.

3. “The Salt” • http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/06/27/155527365/visualizing-a-nation-of-meat-eaters

4. Activity: “Eating Lower on the Food Chain” • Read directions. • Follow instructions on calculating eating lower on the food chain. • Change in problem #5, 90 kg to 9kg.