Understanding Hawaiian Pizza as a System Output, understanding systems

Understanding Hawaiian Pizza as a System Output

Step 1: Introduction – understanding systems
Most Canadians consume fast food (some of us more than others), but we tend not to think about where
the things we eat came from, or h
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single fast food item reaches our lips, and by doing so, we will get a simple introduction to how humanenvironment
interactions can be thought of from the perspective of a systems approach. We will do this
using one a common fast food item: a slice of Hawaiian pizza.1
Learning Objectives
The aim of this lab is to get you to start thinking in a systematic fashion about human-environment
relations. By completing this lab, you will:
 Learn how to think about common objects and phenomena as being products or outcomes of
systems
 Develop an understanding of how a systems approach may be used to examine and interpret the
connections between human activities and ecological processes
 Apply the idea of a systems approach by methodically tracing the origins of a fast food item and
identifying the resources and energy that must be mobilized to create it
 Analyze and explain a systems diagram that you create
 Practice succinct analytical writing
Step 2: Context
Categorizing the things we eat
We can categorize the things we eat and drink in three general ways.
There are whole foods, that is, foods that are consumed directly as they are obtained from nature, such
as an apple or banana, or a glass of water. Whole foods require little or no processing before they can be
consumed. At the grocery store, we find them most often in the produce section and at the fresh meat
and seafood counters. Whole foods are typically not sold as distinct menu items at fast food restaurants,
although some restaurants will offer, for example, apple slices as an option for kids’ meals instead of
French fries. A cut of raw meat (e.g. a steak, pork chop, or chicken breast) or a fish is also considered to
be a whole food, although in reality most of us purchase such food items only after they have been
butchered and cleaned.
At the other end of the spectrum are processed foods, ones that that have been transformed from whole
foods through a variety mechanical, chemical, and/or other processes, often using an assemblage of
additional ingredients derived from other foods. Processed foods may also contain non-food ingredients,
such as flavorings, colours, waxes, emulsifiers, preservatives, or nutrient supplements. Processed foods
make up an increasingly large proportion of the items sold at grocery stores, and make up most of the
items on fast food restaurant menus. In fact, it is the processing and extra ingredients that make fast
foods “fast” in the first place. Roasting a whole chicken in an oven can take hours, but shredded and precooked
chicken meat that has been pressed, seasoned, and breaded to form a ‘nugget’ can be heated and
served in a matter of minutes. Some fast food items are lightly processed, and the original whole food
source is still recognizable, an example being chocolate milk. Other fast food items require far greater
processing and contain complex lists of ingredients. For example, there are over thirty ingredients in just

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The toppings for a standard ‘Hawaiian’ pizza consist of tomato sauce, cheese, ham and pineapple.
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the bun of a McDonald’s Big Mac sandwich. By comparison, you can bake a very tasty bun in your
home kitchen using just six simple ingredients: flour, water, yeast, salt, sugar, and oil. Why does a Big
Mac bun require five times the number of ingredients? Your homemade buns wouldn’t be of uniform
shape or density, would not hold two hamburger patties and all the wet Big Mac ingredients without
falling apart, and would start to go stale quickly because they contain no preservatives.
Many of the food items we order at restaurants are composites of the other two categories, such as a
hamburger that has lettuce and tomato toppings, or a plastic clamshell containing a salad made of lettuce
and tomatoes (whole foods) topped with simulated bacon bits and creamy dressing (processed food
items). As you will find when you complete this assignment, the ingredients for a Hawaiian pizza
consist of food items that have undergone varying degrees of processing.
The origins of fast food ingredients
Most of the source ingredients for fast foods are derived from plants and animals, that in turn originate
on farms, plantations, or animal feedlots – places where natural systems have been heavily modified by
humans to raise large numbers of organisms domesticated from a small number of plant and animal
species. Indeed, the plants and animals themselves have been heavily modified from their original,
natural forms (e.g. try finding ‘wild’ dairy cows – they do not exist. The auroch – the animal from which
domesticated cattle are descended – went extinct centuries ago). The one main exception to this is wildcaught
fish – typically pollock and tuna – that are made into sandwiches at fast food restaurants.
However, even in these cases significant technological effort goes into capturing, filleting, freezing, and
transporting wild-caught fish. And, just as the environmental impacts of commercial agriculture are
considerable, so, too, are the impacts of commercial fishing on marine ecosystems.
The geographical origins of foods and ingredients used in restaurant foods and beverages vary. Some,
such as milk and fresh cream, are obtained from local (or relatively local) sources because they spoil
quickly and/or cannot be easily shipped across long distances. Other common ingredients, like cane
sugar, coffee, tea, and many fruits cannot be grown in Canada, and must be imported from far-off
places.
For some ingredients, the restaurant has choices of where to source food items and ingredients. Take
frozen beef, for example, which is produced in, and exported from, many countries around the world.
Some restaurants advertise that they use only 100% Canadian beef in their burgers as a way of appealing
to customers who perceive this as being a higher quality product. If a fast food restaurant does not make
such an advertisement about its ingredients, there is a good chance they may come from sources outside
Canada, such as the USA, South America, or elsewhere. Some restaurants deliberately conceal the
origins of their ingredients. For example, Canada’s largest chain of takeaway coffee shops, Tim Hortons,
does not disclose publicly the geographical origins of its coffee beans, or how they are grown, except in
the most general terms.
Don’t forget the packaging
Fast food items are rarely served with reusable dishes, glasses, or cutlery. Rather, they come wrapped in
some sort of non-reusable material (waxed paper, plastic, polystyrene, or tinfoil) and are accompanied
by utensils (spoons, forks, straws, lids, etc.) that are usually made out of plastic or, occasionally, wood
or bamboo (e.g. chopsticks, stir sticks). The packaging and utensils are key components of the fast food
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item. Some of it may be recyclable depending on where you live, but at a national and international
scale, most fast food waste is simply discarded. Not all of the discarded packaging gets disposed of
properly; a noticeable amount is simply cast aside as litter. If in doubt, take a walk along the roadside
within a kilometer of a drive-through restaurant and count the number of discarded cups, lids, and
wrappers you find. Rest assured, it will be considerable. While the cups and paper wrappers will
eventually break down and decompose through natural processes, a plastic lid tossed at the roadside will
remain in the environment long after the person who tossed it there is dead.
As with the food itself, fast food packaging items and utensils also have their origins in nature. Wooden
stir sticks and chopsticks are derived from trees or bamboo; foil wrappers are made from aluminum,
which in term obtained by refining a mineral called bauxite, that is mined in tropical countries; and,
polystyrene and plastic packaging is derived from oil.
Step 3: Preparation and lab meeting activities
To prepare yourself for this lab, before you attend the lab meeting read the sections of chapter 3 in your
course textbook that describe and discuss systems and system approaches.
In your lab meeting, your lab demonstrator will show this TED video featuring New York Times food
writer Mark Bittman, entitled, “What’s Wrong With What We Eat”.

In it, Bittman describes a wide array of environmental, social, and human health problems associated
with our food production system and our food itself. His concerns range from the greenhouse gases
produced by commercial livestock operations to the rising rates of obesity and diabetes in western
countries caused by overconsumption of processed foods. How would we ever begin to disentangle the
causes, effects, and impacts of this complex set of interactions between people and the planet described
by Bittman, and work towards an improvement? In case you haven’t guessed it, one good way would be
to analyze it using a systems approach.
As you watch the video, take a sheet of blank paper and a pencil and scribble down all the problems,
causes, and connections between food consumption, food production, and the environment that Bittman
describes, and see how you start to generate a diagram that illustrates a set of interconnected systems.
Your lab demonstrator will guide you through a discussion to help you identify some of the systems
elements in the video, which is what you’re going to be doing in this lab assignment: taking one small
part of the food system – a slice of pizza – and creating a diagram to illustrate some of the important
human processes that interact to produce that pizza, and the points where they connect with natural
systems.
To do the exercises that follow, you will need several sheets of oversized blank paper. Depending on
how you plan to display your results in your final assignment submission, you may also wish to learn to
use drawing features of a common software like Microsoft Word or download a free flowchart-drawing
software. Your lab demonstrator will walk you through the following instructions at your lab meeting
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and answer any questions you may have; you will then do the assignment on your own and submit it
electronically before your next lab meeting.
Step 4 Lab Assignment: A slice of Hawaiian pizza as a system output
In this lab we want to think about the ingredients that go into a fast food item, trace where they come
from, and figure out all the various resources that must be mobilized to assemble the ingredients and put
the fast food item into the consumer’s hands. In doing so, we will be tracing a series of interactions
between humans and nature. We won’t be documenting a complete set of systems interactions – that
would be far too involved for a single lab exercise – but we will be generating a diagram that illustrates
a limited set of human interactions with the environment. It’s a good way to start thinking about the
connections between human and natural systems, and how simple human activities, such as eating a
slice of pizza, can place remarkable demands on the environment.
For this exercise, we are going to select a slice of takeaway Hawaiian pizza, served on a triangular
shaped cardboard tray (we could easily have chosen some other fast food item instead, since this
exercise works just as well with a cup of coffee, a taco, or a burger). You are then going to attempt to
document in a systematic fashion the geographical movements of all the ingredients and packaging from
their points of origin to a pizza outlet, the types of transportation that were involved, and the additional
inputs that were necessary to make the slice possible. By the end, you will have created a diagram that
illustrates the inputs to create a Hawaiian pizza and the likely origins of those inputs. At first glance this
may sound easy, but you will soon find it is more complicated than expected.
Step 1 Deconstruct the pizza.
The following steps can be done on a computer screen, but you will find it easier and quicker to do them
manually. Start by taking a large blank sheet of paper and in the bottom left hand corner, make a small
square and write in it, ‘pizza’. Then, not too far away, draw as many small boxes as you need to list all
the ingredients and packaging items so that each one has its own separate box, and link each of these
with an arrow to the first box labelled ‘pizza’. I’m going to demonstrate by using another popular fast
food item, a McDonald’s Big Mac sandwich.
The Big Mac is actually more complicated to deconstruct than a slice of pizza, because it contains more
components, and many of these components are actually composites of other ingredients. See Figure 1
below, where I created nine boxes for the main components of a Big Mac: bun, beef patties, processed
cheese, sauce, pickle slices, shredded lettuce, onions, and the cardboard box in which it is served. You
will recall I mentioned earlier that the bun alone on a Big Mac contains over 30 ingredients. I am going
to cheat here and not create 30 additional boxes for each of the ingredients of the bun. I also won’t add
32 more boxes for each of the ingredients of the sauce. Instead, I will simply add boxes for the main
ingredients of each of the components of the Big Mac: next to ‘processed cheese (16 ingredients)’ I
added a single box labelled ‘dairy products’; near ‘pickle slices’ I added boxes for the 2 main
ingredients, ‘cucumber’ and ‘vinegar’; near ‘bun’ I added a box for ‘wheat flour’, and so forth. The
sauce for a Big Mac is a bit more complicated since there’s no one dominant ingredient, so I listed a few
of the main ones like soybean oil, high fructose corn syrup, vinegar, and egg yolks.
Here’s what I came up with for a Big Mac:
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Figure 1: First stage, deconstructing the components
Now you make a similar diagram for a Hawaiian pizza.
Step 2 Source the components.
Now that you have all the main ingredients listed, the next step is to add another set of boxes listing
where each of those ingredients came from before they were shipped to the pizza shop. So, in my
example, the Big Mac buns would have come from a bakery, the beef patties from a meat processing
plant, the cheese from a cheese-making factory, the lettuce and onions from fruit & vegetable processing
facilities, the sauce and pickles from condiment-making factories, and so forth. Connect each of these
boxes to the ingredient name with an arrow. In case you haven’t already guessed, the next step is to keep
adding boxes until you have traced every ingredient back to its original source in nature. Using cheese as
the example, the cheese-processing factory needs to get milk from operators of dairy farms that milk
individual cows on a daily basis (the milk might first go to a dairy for pasteurization before it gets
shipped onward to the cheese factory). The bakery obtains flour that has been ground from wheat at a
flour mill, which in turn gets that wheat from grain farms.
If you don’t exactly know all the specific ingredients of pizza crust, sauce, cheese, etc and how they are
made, don’t guess: do some research and find out. Once you’ve gotten this far, your diagram should start
to look something like Figure 2 (I used red ink here to show the additions since Figure 1, but you don’t
have to do so). I see that I forgot to include in figure 2 where the cardboard box came from (a boxboard
mill). I’ll add that in later. Again, you should now do the same for your diagram of the pizza.

Figure 2: Where the key components originate
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Step 3 Add modes of transportation.
Your next step is to insert between each set of square boxes a circle, and inside this circle you’re going
to write the type of transportation that was likely used to move inputs from one part of the process to the
next. You may need to redraw your diagram in order to do this. For example, the milk that went into the
dairy products was likely transported from the farm to a dairy or cheese factory by tanker truck, and then
on to the McDonalds warehouse by refrigerated truck. Cattle that are to be slaughtered and made into
hamburger patties are typically moved from the farm to the slaughterhouse (also called a meat-packing
facility) in the back of a livestock trailer. The burger meat is usually shipped from the meat packers to
the restaurant chain by freezer truck. By contrast, the grain used to make flour is often transported over
long distances by rail, a cheaper means of bulk transport than truck. If you are not certain how your food
item got from one point to another in the production chain, do some online research (and be certain to
record any sources that you have used, be they online sources, books, or any other format, so that you
can include them in the reference list at the end of your written submission). You will find, for example,
that the ham and the pineapple for your Hawaiian pizza were likely transported in very different ways.
Your diagram will now look something like Figure 3. So as to keep it legible, I’ve used green ink and a
circled letter T to indicate wherever transportation needs to occur, but haven’t indicated what mode of
transport is used, with two exceptions. You can do better than this in your diagram.
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Figure 3: Transportation added
Step 4 Add additional inputs.
Your diagram is really going to get cluttered now, because next you are going to add in all the additional
inputs that were necessary in order to produce the raw plant or animal materials and transform them into
a pizza.
Let’s again consider the Big Mac. To produce even something as simple as a hamburger bun requires
many different types of inputs, at all stages of the process. The grain farmer needs seeds, fertilizers,
herbicides, farm machinery, and fossil fuels to power the machinery (and of course, labourers as well, to
do the work). Once the grain is harvested, more fossil fuel is needed to deliver it by train and truck to the
flour mill, which in turn needs electricity, machinery, and workers, to make the flour. Fossil fuels are
needed to deliver the flour to the bakery, where electricity, machinery, and workers are again needed.
The bakery also needs plastic bags in which to package the buns and keep them fresh. All these
secondary inputs need to be added to your diagram using parallelogram-shaped boxes, so as to
distinguish them from the primary inputs you have already listed. If you are really keen, you can add in
additional boxes to show where these secondary inputs originated. For example, in Ontario, electricity is
generated mainly at nuclear power plants, hydro-electric dams, and thermal generating stations powered
by natural gas. Electricity in Canada’s Prairie provinces is mostly generated by burning coal or natural
gas, while in Quebec almost all electricity comes from hydroelectric dams. Depending on your ambition
(and desire to really impress the person grading your assignment) you may wish to document where the
coal comes from to generate electricity in Alberta or Saskatchewan, how it is transported to the thermal
generation station, and all the additional inputs needed to get it there.
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As you go along, your diagram should start to look something like Figure 4, which is not complete, but a
work in progress.
Figure 4: Additional inputs
Step 5 Tidy up.
Your next step, then, is to redraw your system diagram from scratch so that it is nice, neat, and easy to
read. You can do this by hand or you can use software to help you. Microsoft Office contains Smart Art
tools that can help you create diagrams like this one, or you can also use any number of free software
that are available online. Figure 5 shows what Figure 1 starts to look like when you tidy it up using the
drawing features in Microsoft Word. Once you have generated a nice clean version of your diagram,
save it to your computer. If you created your system diagram on paper, you will need to first scan it and
save it as a JPEG or GIF image.