Follow your breakfast
What places might be connected to the food on your table?
25-40 minutes
Start with these sources
Your first move: Search coffee in UNdata and open the green-coffee production result.
Without AI
- Choose coffee and one other breakfast ingredient; record the commodity definition and available production years.
- Mark several reported producer countries on a map with values, units, and source notes.
- Use solid labels for production evidence and dotted lines for questions about how your own breakfast arrived.
With GenAI
Bring your own AI tool and the source material. This atlas does not send your data anywhere or run an AI model.
- Prepare a small source table and ask AI to organize producer facts by ingredient without guessing brands or routes.
- Ask it for a map legend that separates production, documented trade, and unknown connections.
- Draw the map and verify each label against the source; keep packaging-origin clues separate from statistical evidence.
A prompt to make your own
Help plan a breakfast map using only the production and trade records I supply. Group supported facts by ingredient, retaining commodity definitions, units, years, and citations to supplied URLs. Distinguish production from exports and from the origin of my actual product. Mark missing data and unknown routes explicitly; never fabricate numbers, suppliers, or shipping paths. Suggest a legend and three questions for further investigation. Supplied records: [Paste here.]
Make something: A breakfast map with evidence-backed producer clues and clearly labeled unknown routes.
Keep your footing
- Green coffee and roasted coffee are different commodities.
- Exporting country is not always growing country.
- A global production table cannot identify the beans in your cup.
Why follow this question?
Why this is interesting
Breakfast is a small, familiar place to begin thinking about interdependence. The map can hold farms, processing, transport, and shopping without pretending you have traced them all. An honest dotted line can be more useful than a confident but invented route.
Start with the UNdata coffee search, where several different coffee measures appear. Choosing one is part of the investigation. A clear commodity definition keeps a map from quietly mixing raw crops, processed products, weights, and monetary values.
Follow another thread
Our World in Data offers ways to explore food and environmental questions. Carry your ingredient into that collection, but read the scope of the measure before attaching it to a specific product. You can also compare a package's stated origin with your map and write down what would be needed to bridge the gap.
Go a little further
Add the mug or toaster and connect the map to an invention search.