GGR107H1 Environment, Food and People
The Complete Exam Bible · Fall 2026GGR107H1 Overview
- Fall 2026
- First-year course
- Asynchronous video lectures
- Weekly online quizzes
- In-person final exam
A geography course that uses food as its lens
Environment, Food and People studies how food, nature and society shape one another.
- Assessed by Weekly quizzes, a worldview and critical reading essay, a team commodity case study, tutorial participation and an in-person final exam.
- Hardest step Evaluating an unseen article on exam day: separating its claims from its evidence and naming the kinds of reasoning it uses.
- How to prepare Learn each week's concept with one example, then link readings across weeks so a long answer can draw on the whole course.
How GGR107H1 is assessed
| Component | Weight | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Online Quizzes on readings and lectures | 15% | Weekly, due Tuesdays at noon |
| Worldview Reflection and Critical Reading Exercise | 15% | Individual essay, maximum 1,500 words |
| Food Commodity Case Study (group project) | 20% | Team report, maximum 2,500 words |
| Final Examination | 40% | In person, during the exam period |
| Tutorial participation | 10% | Assessed all term |
The five components on the course evaluation page total 100%. The Tutorial Participation page and the Tutorials page describe participation as worth 15%, while the evaluation page and the participation gradebook entry show 10, so confirm the current figure with your TA. The course will not mark assignments from students who have not registered in a tutorial section, so register even if you never intend to go. The team project requires at least 15 sources, including 5 peer-reviewed articles, in order to pass, and peer evaluations inform participation grades and can affect project grades. Late assignments lose 5% of their value per day, weekends included. The exact components and weights inside the final examination are shared closer to the exam.
Assessment structure
Segment widths reproduce the published percentage weights and total 100%.
Current GGR107H1 dates
| Date | Item | Control |
|---|---|---|
| September 15, 2026 | First weekly quiz | Week 2 quiz, due at noon. |
| October 16, 2026 | Worldview Reflection and Critical Reading Exercise | Due at 11:59 p.m. |
| October 26-30, 2026 | Reading week | No course activities. |
| November 20, 2026 | Food Commodity Case Study | Team project due at 11:59 p.m. |
| December 1-4, 2026 | Final tutorial | Assignment 2 debrief and exam preparation. |
Dates are as published in the Fall 2026 course schedule and assignment pages. Confirm exact deadlines and submission settings in the live LMS.
What GGR107H1 covers
Nine chapters follow the weekly modules, from the definition of a food system and worldviews to commodity chains, food security and the changing food spaces of cities.
Food Systems and Their Feedback Loops
Activities, drivers, outcomes and feedback loops, industrial farming, Indigenous food systems and why food is always locally embeddedThe definition behind Week 2
The course defines a food system, following Neff and Lawrence, as every activity and resource used to grow, move and eat food, plus the forces behind those processes, what they produce, and the relationships and feedback loops that connect them.
- The Neff and Lawrence definition of a food system
- Drivers, outcomes and feedback loops
- Industrial farming and its single goal
- Indigenous food systems and the Three Sisters
- The scale of the U.S. food system
- Food as always locally embedded
Worldview and Perspective Consciousness
Christie and Hill on worldview, Hanvey on perspective consciousness, the political compass and a worldview in a foodTwo definitions of worldview
Week 3 defines a worldview first as a set of concepts relating people within a culture to the natural universe and to one another, and then, with Carol Hill, as a culture's basic way of interpreting things, its concept of what is good, important, sacred and real.
- Christie's definition of worldview
- Carol Hill: worldview as a concept of reality
- Perspective consciousness
- Personal, collective and structural influences
- The political compass as a window
- A worldview in a food
Wild Rice on Turtle Island: Worldviews in Conflict
LaDuke on wild rice, the Anishinaabe, the Pigeon Lake dispute between cottagers and harvesters, treaties and braided knowledgeThe case study for worldview
Week 3 applies the idea of worldview to wild rice on Turtle Island.
- LaDuke's account of wild rice
- Who the Anishinaabe are
- The Pigeon Lake news clip
- Treaty rights and the Dish with One Spoon
- Braiding ways of knowing
- Wild rice and the debate on biodiversity, culture and globalization
Critical Reading of Claims and Evidence
Claims, context, five kinds of reasoning, quality of evidence and an overall verdict, the routine behind the exam's unseen articleA skill that is also exam content
The first section of the final examination asks you to read and evaluate a short article you have never seen, like Part Two of the Worldview Reflection.
- An argument as claim plus evidence
- Context: author, audience, affiliation, type of writing
- Five kinds of reasoning
- Primary and secondary evidence
- Evaluating errors, gaps and assumptions
- SQ3R and A+IQ reading strategies
Animals in Agriculture: Ghosts and Things
Weis on defaunation and industrial livestock, commodi-faunation, the land sparing argument and reasoning in Ghosts and ThingsTwo trends in one argument
Tony Weis's article sets wild animals becoming ghosts, through the extinction spasm and defaunation, against farmed animals in industrial livestock systems, whose numbers soar while they are treated as interchangeable things.
- Ghosts: defaunation and the extinction spasm
- Things: animals in industrial livestock
- Commodi-faunation
- Biological simplification and standardization
- The argument against land sparing
- Reasoning types in Weis's article
Technology in Agriculture and the Green Revolution
Views of agricultural technology, the Green Revolution in India and Africa, Shiva's monoculture of the mind, mechanization in northern Ghana and a critical reading of a videoGood for whom?
Week 5 asks whether technological advancement in agriculture is always good, and for whom.
- Views of technology as worldviews
- The Green Revolution in India and Africa
- Monoculture of the mind
- Mechanization and gendered livelihoods in northern Ghana
- Critical reading of a recorded talk
- Generative AI as a technology to evaluate
Food Commodity Chains and Telecoupling
The tomato case study, telecoupling, tracing a specific food from origin to consumer, issues along the chain and the source rules of the team projectFollowing a food
Week 7 introduces the food commodity chain through a tomato case study and a reading on telecoupling through tomato trade, subtitled with the question of what shoppers fail to know about the tomatoes they eat.
- The food commodity chain
- Telecoupling through trade
- Specific versus general claims
- Social and environmental issues in a chain
- Ranking sources for a case study
- Rules for using generative AI
Food Security, Trade and Geopolitics
Food trade as geopolitics, the contrast of food security with food sovereignty, self-sufficiency and the evolution of national food security strategiesTrade as geopolitics
Week 8 links food trade to geopolitics and introduces food security and food sovereignty.
- Food trade and geopolitics
- Food security
- Food sovereignty
- Self-sufficiency and import dependence
- Food security strategies that evolve
- Library research for the team project
Urban Food Spaces, Gentrification and Alternatives
Places where food is sold and eaten, food and gentrification, urban agriculture within racial capitalism and resistance, and urban forest justiceFood in the changing city
Week 9 covers places of food retail and consumption and the role of food in gentrification, through a conversation in Gastronomica asking how food reinforces gentrification but also inspires resistance.
- Places where food is sold and eaten
- How food reinforces gentrification
- Food as resistance
- Urban agriculture and racial capitalism
- Urban forest justice and wild foods
- Linking urban food to earlier weeks
Its calendar description starts from a simple observation: every human life depends on food, most cultures place it at their centre, and producing it changes physical and social environments far and wide.
The course therefore uses food as a lens on human-environment interactions, locally and globally, and offers a first course in human and environmental geography at the University of Toronto.
How the term is organized
Week 1 asks why a geography course should be about food. Week 2 defines the food system, using a definition that counts activities, drivers, outcomes and feedback loops.
Week 3 introduces worldview and perspective consciousness through the case of wild rice on Turtle Island, where cottagers and Anishinaabe harvesters read the same lake in different ways. Week 4 pairs critical reading with Tony Weis's article on animals in agriculture, and Week 5 examines views of technology, the Green Revolution in India and Africa, and a study of mechanization in northern Ghana.
After a week for the first assignment, the course follows food commodity chains through a tomato case study in Week 7, turns to food security, trade and geopolitics in Week 8, and moves into the city with food retail and gentrification in Week 9 and alternative food practices in Week 11. Week 12 is exam review.
What the assessments ask of you
The course's learning outcomes describe four abilities: understanding where the global food system came from and the concepts that explain it; telling claims from evidence and examining the worldviews beneath arguments, including your own; assembling reputable evidence for your own position; and communicating opinions and evidence orally and in writing.
Each assessment exercises them. The weekly quizzes test the readings and lectures. The Worldview Reflection and Critical Reading Exercise asks you to describe your worldview, critically read a short article and connect the two. The Food Commodity Case Study asks a team to trace one specific food from origin to consumer and analyze the social and environmental issues along the way.
The final examination combines a critical reading of an unseen article, quiz questions, short answers and a broad long answer.
How this guide is built
The nine chapters follow the weekly modules. Each restates the course ideas in plain language, works a model answer of the kind the short answer section rewards, and ends with practice in the quiz and short answer styles.
Model answers and practice items are written by AskSia; they are study aids, not course materials or marking schemes.
Worked example · free
Explain a supermarket price with the food system definition
- 2Define the food system as activities and resources plus drivers, outcomes, relationships and feedback loops.
- 2Place the lower price among other outcomes of the same activities, such as water used, land farmed and work done.
- 2State a feedback loop with its direction: the lower price raises demand, which rewards the lowest-cost growers.
Key terms
- Food System
- Every activity and resource used to grow, move and eat food, together with its drivers, outcomes, relationships and feedback loops.
- Feedback Loop
- A relationship in which an outcome of the food system returns to change one of its drivers.
- Industrial Farming
- Farming that treats the farm as a factory, turning inputs into outputs through specialization, standardization and efficiency for the highest yield at the lowest cost.
- Worldview
- The set of concepts through which people in a culture relate to nature and to one another.
- Perspective Consciousness
- Awareness that your view of the world is not universally shared, was shaped by influences you rarely notice, and differs from others' views.
- Anishinaabe
- An ethnic term for the shared culture and related languages of Algonquian peoples of the Great Lakes area, meaning original person.
- Critical Reading
- Reading that identifies a text's claims, context, reasoning and evidence and then judges how well the argument holds.
- Argument
- In the course's formula, a claim plus the evidence offered for it.
- Empirical Reasoning
- Reasoning based on observations of the material world, whether qualitative or quantitative.
- Defaunation
- The decline in animal species, populations and abundance.
- Commodi-faunation
- Weis's term for industrial livestock systems in which animal life is organised as a commodity.
- Commodity Chain
- The sequence of places and people through which a food is grown, harvested, processed, packed, shipped and sold.
- Telecoupling
- The linking of distant places through flows such as trade, so that choices in one place affect another.
- Food Sovereignty
- Control over how food is produced, traded and distributed, and over whose interests those decisions serve.
GGR107H1 FAQ
What is on the final exam for this food and environment course?
The exam page lists four sections: a critical reading exercise on a short article you have not seen, a random selection of weekly quiz questions, short answer questions that ask you to summarize and synthesize, and one broad long answer question. It covers all material back to Week One. The exact components and their weights are shared closer to the exam.
How much is each assessment worth?
The evaluation page lists weekly online quizzes at 15%, the Worldview Reflection and Critical Reading Exercise at 15%, the Food Commodity Case Study team project at 20%, the final examination at 40% and tutorial participation at 10%. Two other pages describe participation as 15%, so confirm the current split with your TA.
How do the weekly quizzes work?
Each quiz opens on Sunday at noon and closes on Tuesday at noon, with questions drawn at random from a bank. They are open book, you have three attempts, and your best attempt counts. Questions cover the required readings and required videos, not the skill-building or optional material.
What does critical reading mean in this course?
It is a five-step routine: identify the central claims, place the text in context, distinguish the kinds of reasoning it uses, examine the quality of its evidence, and evaluate the argument as a whole. It does not mean disagreeing with everything; it asks for a balanced judgment that is aware of your own worldview.
What are the five kinds of reasoning I need to recognise?
Empirical reasoning rests on observations of the material world; logical reasoning on valid inferences from premises; conceptual reasoning on abstract ideas and theories; ethical reasoning on moral principles and values; and aesthetic reasoning on a sense of beauty. Opinion pieces usually mix several of them in a single argument.
How should my team choose a food for the commodity case study?
Pick one very specific item, such as a product bought on a named day at a named shop, because the same food from different shops or seasons can come from very different places. If you cannot trace it exactly, show where most of that commodity comes from and say which parts of your chain are general.
Can I use generative AI in the assignments?
Only where each assignment allows it. The worldview assignment permits no AI at all. In the team project you may use AI to look for information on your food's chain and to improve the flow of a draft, with conditions: check every claim, cite the real sources, rewrite in your own words and append the AI material.
Questions students ask in each GGR107H1 chapter
- Why does the course define a food system so broadly?
- Because the narrower picture of farms, factories and shops hides most of what food does. Counting drivers, outcomes and feedback loops lets you see effects on water, land, labour and culture, and how those effects return to reshape the way food is produced. Chapter 01 · Food Systems and Their Feedback Loops
- What is the difference between a worldview and an opinion?
- An opinion is a view on a particular question; a worldview is the frame beneath many opinions, the concepts that relate a person to nature and to others. The Week 3 quiz used this difference, offering definitions of epistemology, reasoning and bias as wrong answers. Chapter 02 · Worldview and Perspective Consciousness
- Why does the course use wild rice to teach worldview?
- Because one plant carries very different meanings. LaDuke presents wild rice as sustenance and ceremony, and as an example of the worldwide debate on biodiversity, culture and globalization, while some cottagers saw it as an obstacle to boating. The contrast makes worldviews visible. Chapter 03 · Wild Rice on Turtle Island: Worldviews in Conflict
- Does critical reading mean finding fault with an article?
- No. The Week 5 exercise says critical reading does not require disagreeing with everything. It asks for a well-thought-out summation of the text's strengths and weaknesses, made with awareness of how your own worldview shapes your response to particular perspectives and kinds of evidence. Chapter 04 · Critical Reading of Claims and Evidence
- What does Weis mean by ghosts and things?
- Ghosts are wild animals disappearing through defaunation and the extinction spasm, whose absence impoverishes landscapes. Things are animals in industrial livestock production, whose numbers soar while they are treated as fungible units. Weis argues that the two trends are connected and central to sustainability. Chapter 05 · Animals in Agriculture: Ghosts and Things
- Why does the course ask whether technology is good for whom?
- Because the same technology can benefit one group while costing another. The Week 4 worldview exercise first asks whether scientific or technological advancement is always good, and for whom, and Week 5 applies the question to agriculture through the Green Revolution in India and Africa. Chapter 06 · Technology in Agriculture and the Green Revolution
- What does telecoupling mean in the tomato reading?
- It describes how trade couples distant places, so that buying a tomato in one place connects the shopper to land, water and workers somewhere else. The reading's subtitle stresses the result: consumers do not know much about the tomato on their plate. Chapter 07 · Food Commodity Chains and Telecoupling
- How are food security and food sovereignty different?
- Food security concerns whether people can reliably get enough food. Food sovereignty concerns control: who decides how food is produced, traded and distributed, and whose interests those decisions serve. A country could achieve one without the other, which is why the course pairs them. Chapter 08 · Food Security, Trade and Geopolitics
- Does food cause gentrification?
- The Week 9 reading asks how food reinforces gentrification, not how it causes it. Food spaces signal and can speed a change that other forces also drive, and the same reading asks how food can inspire resistance, so a full answer covers both directions. Chapter 09 · Urban Food Spaces, Gentrification and Alternatives
How to study for the exam
Work in three passes that mirror the exam. First, for each week, write the key concept in one sentence and attach one piece of evidence from the reading or lecture: the food system definition with the United States water figure, perspective consciousness with the Pigeon Lake clip, defaunation with the wildlife index.
Second, rehearse the critical reading routine on a short article you have not read before, timing yourself and finishing with a split verdict that names one strength and one weakness. Third, build long answer plans that join at least three weeks, for example wild rice, industrial livestock and urban agriculture on the question of who decides how land is used.
Revisit the weekly quiz questions without notes, since the exam draws on them, and watch the Week 12 review videos before the final tutorial.
Your AI Environmental Science tutor for GGR107H1
Stuck on a hard GGR107H1 question? Sia is AskSia’s AI Environmental Science tutor — ask any GGR107H1 Environment, Food and People question and get a clear, step-by-step explanation grounded in how the course is actually taught and assessed. Read this whole study guide free, then take your hardest questions to Sia.
