# 4.3 The biodiversity of your diet

Now it is time to use the food you were asked to record for a day in Activity 3 to look at the biodiversity of your own diet, or that of someone you know well (or you could use the ingredients list of a recipe if you didn’t record a diary). Activity 5 guides you through this process.

## Activity 5 Explore the diversity of your diet for a day

Allow around 45 minutes.

Task 1

First, access the food diary that you produced for a day. Then open the Dinner Plate Diversity interactive and complete the following steps.

- Select the species eaten during that day, using the drop-down lists in the food categories or the search function. Remember that you may need to further split some foods down into their component ingredients or sources, in order to record them in the checkboxes available.
- Save a copy of the resulting tree using the ‘Save image’ button.
- Now download the list of species you have eaten, using the ‘Export’ button. Copy the data into your preferred spreadsheet software.
- Finally, use the sorting tools in your spreadsheet program to order your species by kingdom, family and genus. (Consult the ‘Help’ function within the spreadsheet program if you need more information about how to do this.)

Task 2

Summarise the diversity of the things you ate that day by filling in the box below.

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Number of kingdoms: Number of families: Number of species:

Task 3

Write a summary of your diet for the day. Were you surprised by how many species you ate in a day?

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Next you will look at the associations between food, culture and traditions.

OpenLearn - Eating for the environment
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