EXTRA CREDIT ASSIGNMENT 2
The Local Basket in the Global Market

Handout date: September 23

Value: Worth 15 points towards your semester grade

Goal: How localized is our diet?

Length: No more than two pages.

Assignment: The first extra credit assignment asked you to go to the supermarket and find 20 items from 20 countries. Nobody had any trouble finding that many items produced in other countries.

But how much of our diet really IS global, and how much is produced right here in the USA? Critics of globalization say that in fact, global trade is still a very small part of the total world economy. The global stuff attracts a lot of attention, but in everyday life, they say, most people still participate in national, not global, economies.

So this assignment has you look at what someone is really buying, rather than what they could buy. Here's how you do it. Find a friend or relative who is going shopping at the supermarket. They have to be really shopping - buying more than 20 items, instead of just picking up a few things. Ideally they should be shopping for themselves or a small family or household group.

Ask them to let you look at their bags of groceries when they are done. You could go to the store with them, and do this in the cart after check-out, or just wait for them when they get home, so you can go through the bags. Now, sort everything in the bag into three categories. Things you know are made in the USA, things you know are made or produced in another country, and things which you are not sure about. You can figure that most fresh vegetables are grown in the US, and if something does not say where it is from, it is probably from the US. Some things might have been grown somewhere else but packaged in the US - you can count those as foreign.

1. The total number of items (count bags of oranges as 1 item, don’t count each one)
2. The percentage of the total in each of the three categories (a chart or table is good)
3. Do the numbers accurately reflect the amount of the diet that is imported? (It's possible that the numbers are biased by a few tiny items, like spices).
4. What do you conclude? Is the US diet local or global? Explain your reasoning.