Welcome to our new monthly feature, ‘Geography Insights: Voices from the Classroom.’ This column will be written by Year 11 IB student Serena Farley, who will share her personal insights and reflections on key learnings and contemporary issues covered in our IB Geography classes. Through Serena’s commentaries, we hope to offer a unique perspective on the topics that shape our understanding of the world, highlighting her voice and thoughts on global issues studied in class.
Globalisation on a Plate: Investigating Food, Culture, and Nutrition in IB Geography
This week in our IB Geography HL class, we held a food-sharing activity where each student brought a dish that was either traditional to a specific culture or influenced by globalisation. This activity helped us practically explore key syllabus concepts such as the impact of globalisation on food consumption, changing diets, and cultural influences on health and nutrition.
The food ranged from home-cooked traditional desserts to highly processed or globally recognisable dishes, which allowed us to compare local food systems with globalised food chains. Through this, we observed how globalisation leads to the homogenisation of diets, with fast food and processed items becoming common across different countries, while also threatening the preservation of local food cultures.
The class discussion focused on how access to different types of food varies greatly between high-income and low-income countries, and how global trade patterns influence availability. We also linked the activity to nutrition transition theory, noting how diets in many middle-income countries are shifting from traditional, plant-based meals to more energy-dense, processed foods due to urbanisation, media influence, and changing lifestyles.
This food-sharing experience reinforced our understanding of how global systems affect health outcomes. For instance, we discussed how the spread of processed, high-fat, and high-sugar foods contributes to non-communicable diseases like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, even in places that previously struggled with undernutrition. We also touched on the double burden of malnutrition, where both undernutrition and overnutrition exist within the same communities or even households.
Finally, we reflected on our own roles as global consumers and how personal choices are influenced by cultural background, socioeconomic status, and global food marketing. The activity connected well to our previous lessons on food security and sovereignty, showing that food is not just a resource, but also a lens through which we can analyse inequality, identity, and health.
– Serena Farley (Year 11)
– Supported by Danielle Rodrigues Head of Department – Human Society and it’s Environment (HSIE)
Globalisation on a Plate: Investigating Food, Culture, and Nutrition in IB Geography