Chapter 36 — Exercises

Three tiers. 🪞 the Learning Check-In and reflection; 🔄 retrieval.

⚠️ This chapter closes Part VI. Tier 3's S6 and the reflection questions look back across all seven chapters — do them properly, because Part VII assumes you have.

Tier 1 — Recall and Comprehension

R1. ⚠️ What two debts did Chapter 32 leave for this chapter? Quote or paraphrase both.

R2. ⚠️ Name the seven stages of a food system, ⚠️ and the two properties of the whole that matter more than any single stage.

R3. ⚠️ Give the four mechanisms in §36.2 that make the cheapest calories what they are. ⚠️ Why would removing subsidies NOT fix the price gap?

R4. ⚠️ State the ✅ finding on environmental impact ordering. ⚠️ What is the within-category variation finding, and why does it not change the conclusion?

R5. ⚠️ Give the verdicts on local sourcing, air freight, organic, packaging and waste. ⚠️ Which is the only ✅?

R6. ⚠️ Explain the unit problem. ⚠️ Why does salad look terrible per calorie and sugar look excellent? ⚠️ What is the practical rule for reading any environmental comparison?

R7. ⚠️ Give the seven business problems that ultra-processed food solves (§36.5).

R8. ⚠️ State §36.5's both-halves point about reformulation.

R9. ⚠️ Where does the food system narrow? ⚠️ Which narrowing matters most for what a shopper sees, and what does a retail buyer actually optimize for?

R10. ⚠️ What is eye-level shelf position frequently a signal of?

R11. ⚠️ What is the ✅ finding on marketing to children? ⚠️ What is 🟡 about restricting it?

R12. ⚠️ Give §36.7's intervention ladder in order. ⚠️ State the organizing principle, and which earlier chapter it matches.

R13. ⚠️ Which tier is the weakest and the most funded? ⚠️ Why?

R14. ⚠️ How does food waste differ between lower- and higher-income countries? ⚠️ Why is waste the highest-leverage environmental item?

R15. ⚠️ Give §36.9's convergence table. ⚠️ Name the three places where the environmental and nutritional optima genuinely DIVERGE.

R16. ⚠️ Give the three structural features that concentrate food-security risk. ⚠️ Name one environmentally beneficial change that REDUCES resilience.

R17. ⚠️ State what is TRUE and what is FALSE in "individual choices don't matter." ⚠️ Give the defensible position.

R18. ⚠️ Give §36.11's ranking of individual actions. ⚠️ What is in the last row and why is it "not decoration"?

R19. ⚠️ Name four things the historical record in §36.13b teaches. ⚠️ Give the five opposition arguments.

R20. ⚠️ What has each 🧾 block in Part VI costed? ⚠️ What does the sequence say?

Tier 2 — Application

A1. 🔄 ⚠️ The denominator hunt. Find three environmental claims about food — an advertisement, a news article, a company sustainability page.

a) ⚠️ What is the denominator in each? b) ⚠️ Is it stated, or did you have to infer it? c) ⚠️ Would the ranking change under a different unit? d) ⚠️ Who benefits from the unit chosen?

A2. ⚠️ Shelf audit. In any shop.

a) ⚠️ What is at eye level in three aisles? b) ⚠️ What is on the bottom shelf? c) ⚠️ What is at the checkout and the end of aisles? d) ⚠️ Which of those positions do you think were purchased? (§36.5b.)

A3. ⚠️ Rank an intervention. Take a real food policy in your country.

a) ⚠️ Which §36.7 tier? b) ⚠️ Does it require anyone to make a decision at point of purchase? c) ⚠️ Predict its effect size from (b) alone. d) ⚠️ Then find the evaluation. Were you right?

A4. ⚠️ The opposition template. Find the industry response to a food regulation — a consultation submission, a press release, a trade-body statement.

a) ⚠️ Which of §36.13b's five arguments appear? b) ⚠️ Are any of them true? ⚠️ Be fair — sometimes one is. c) ⚠️ Which was disproved by the industry's own subsequent behaviour?

A5. ⚠️ The convergence check. Take your own current diet.

a) ⚠️ List five changes that would improve it nutritionally. b) ⚠️ List five that would reduce its footprint. c) ⚠️ How much overlap? (§36.9 predicts a lot.) d) ⚠️ Where they diverge, which of §36.9's three named divergences is it?

A6. ⚠️ Find the decision-maker. Take one thing about your food environment you cannot change.

a) ⚠️ Name the specific person, role or body that decides it. ⚠️ "The system" is not an answer. b) ⚠️ Is there a consultation, meeting, representative or review? c) ⚠️ What would responding cost you in minutes?

Tier 3 — Analysis and Synthesis

S1. ⚠️ The optimization argument. §36.1 says the system is extraordinarily good at what it was built to do.

a) ⚠️ State the objective it was actually optimized for. b) ⚠️ What would a system optimized for population health look like at each of the seven stages? c) ⚠️ What would it be worse at? ⚠️ Be specific — this is the part usually skipped.

S2. ⚠️ Political difficulty and effect size. Case Study 1 found them inversely related.

a) ⚠️ Is that a general law? Construct a counter-example. b) ⚠️ If it is roughly true, what follows for how you read a proposed policy? c) ⚠️ Apply it to a current debate in your country.

S3. ⚠️ Education's distributional failure. Interventions that require a decision help those who needed them least.

a) ⚠️ Why does this happen, mechanistically? b) ⚠️ Find two other examples in this book. (Chapters 30 and 32.) c) ⚠️ Does it apply to THIS BOOK? ⚠️ Answer honestly — Chapter 38 will ask again.

S4. ⚠️ The two convergences. Chapter 35 §35.10 and this chapter's §36.9.

a) ⚠️ Are they genuinely independent, or is there a hidden common cause? ⚠️ Look hard for one. b) ⚠️ What would it take to explain both away? c) ⚠️ Chapter 37 is going to build a threshold concept on this pairing. Predict it.

S5. ⚠️ Resilience versus efficiency. §36.10 says they trade off.

a) ⚠️ Which of §36.11's recommended changes increase resilience, and which reduce it? b) ⚠️ How should a policy weigh a small efficiency loss against an unknown probability of a shock? c) ⚠️ Does the same logic apply to a household? (Ch 32 §32.1's food buffer.)

S6. 🔄 ⚠️ Part VI, assembled. Seven chapters.

a) ⚠️ Write one sentence per chapter stating its central practical claim. b) ⚠️ Which two chapters most contradict each other? ⚠️ Resolve it. c) ⚠️ What does Part VI as a whole claim about where the difficulty in eating well actually lies? d) ⚠️ Is that claim consistent with Parts II and III?

🪞 Reflection

M1. 🪞 ⚠️ Learning Check-In question 3 asked you to predict whether the environmental and nutritional optima would converge. ⚠️ What did you predict, and why? ⚠️ If you predicted divergence, where did the expectation of a trade-off come from?

M2. ⚠️ "I did everything on the list. The list was the small part." ⚠️ How does that land after seven chapters of practical advice? Frustrating, clarifying, or both?

M3. ⚠️ §36.11 says "only systems matter" is frequently used to avoid the easy things. ⚠️ Have you used it that way? What would the easy thing be for you?

M4. ⚠️ The eye-level shelf position was purchased. ⚠️ Did you know that? What else about the environment you shop in do you think you have been reading as information rather than as advertising?

M5. 🔄 ⚠️ Nobody had told Marisol that consultations existed. ⚠️ What is the last structural thing you did about food — a vote, a consultation, a policy at work or school? ⚠️ If the answer is nothing, is that a decision you made or one nobody offered you?