Water is the new oil…meaning that moving forward conflicts over resources will concern water. The finite amount of water, growing world population and continued climate change will force us to make some tough decisions in the near future. One of these tough decisions involves poppy farmers in Afghanistan. It is easy and not necessarily wrong to conclude that growing poppy… Read more »
(source: terrapass.com) The reality of fertilizer is that while it supports our food systems in the world, it can contribute even more to the pollution. The byproduct and the production itself of fertilizer contribute much to the carbon foot print of the world. The ecological condition that exists involves the climate impact of food and the overall function of the… Read more »
Tristram Stuart’s TedTalk The Global Food Waste Scandal reveals the global scale of food wasted and addresses the different ways to tackle food waste in the midst of growing world hunger. Stuart presents the unfortunate reality we live in and the responsibility we play in further perpetuating world hunger with the statistics indicating that with the surplus of food in… Read more »
In Lessons eight and nine we looked at water and food, both of which are vital aspects of living. More specifically we saw how different parts of the world have adapted to their climates so that they can accommodate their needs. Many countries have found ways to fix their deficits, such as Israel who went from being one of the… Read more »
In the past three weeks, we have looked at how big of a role economics plays in the food trade. From sugar becoming more than just a luxury good to being a staple in households to planting crops for a drug enterprise because it is the only way to keep families fed. Sugar being a staple is counter-intuitive because it… Read more »
What I found interesting this week was the evolution of food systems, from it’s beginning to it’s present forms. I was previously unaware of the early history of such systems, and of the term “Agarian Revolution”. The lifestyles of humans have evolved dramatically. In a hunter gatherer society, there wasn’t any long term settlement, food was consumed as it was… Read more »
Peter Menziel’s Hungry Planet Gallery synthesizes culture surrounding food and family life in a way that words themselves typically would fail to do. For one thing, the US gallery should be a lesson in excess. One can easily see the massive influence of corporate America by simply following along with the typical family of four’s excursion to the grocery store… Read more »
(source: http://lh4.ggpht.com/) Our world is filled with various cultures and each culture has cuisine that is a representative of their norms, behaviors, and other feat that would mark how one might consume food. In my paper, I compared the food of a US family and that of a Bhutanese family. In the US family, there was an abundance of imported… Read more »
In Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, Peter Menzel captures the effects of our changing world in ways that words cannot. Significant cultural and economic patterns emerge throughout the collection of photographs. Industrialization, globalization, and international trade continue to influence culture, food practices, health, and consumption behavior at the local level. The effects of globalization among families in affluent countries… Read more »
In his photographic essay Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, Peter Menzel provides an intimate look at what families around the world eat. Of the many places featured, two countries stand out in particular: Chad and the United States. In Chad, refugee families subsist on rations of various grains provided by the World Food Program. Families pose by large bags… Read more »