Have you ever experienced hunger? Of course you have. But have you ever experienced the kind of chronic hunger where you can’t physically move because you have no energy? Where you can’t go to school or your job? Where you are so terrified because you know you are a few short days away from death? Malnutrition and hunger affect about… Read more »
Chocolate has gotten somewhat of a bad rap recently and deservedly so. But if chocolate demands and/or prices shifted and children were no longer forced to harvest cocoa, would the majority of them return to school or continue working doing something else? I think it is a fair question to ask when trying to determine just how much blame the… Read more »
In week 3, we discussed how chocolate gets from the cacao farms on the Ivory Coast, to the neatly packaged commodity that we all know and love. As images of children, taken from their families as slave laborers, were shown performing the difficult tasks of harvesting cacao beans, my heart sank. As we learned that farmers, who are underpaid, had… Read more »
In wealthy countries like the U.S., hunger is not really something often brought up because it is not generally a life and death issue here. I have been fortunate enough to grow up in a household where fridges were almost always stocked and putting food on the table was never really an issue. The Lesson 05 Contemplative Practice: Feeling Hunger… Read more »
Shortly after the turn of the century, the developing world shifted from food independent to food dependent. In his book The Real Cost of Cheap Food, Michael Carolan argues that this shift was due to both an inability to compete in the increasingly globalized agricultural market, and strategic bestowments of food aid from developed countries. From about 1960 on, developing countries began to… Read more »
The current model for industrial meat production is not sustainable and severely damaging to the environment. At the current time about 30% of the world’s ice-free surface is used to grow crops that support industrial livestock (Time). Most of this feed is grown using mono-cropping techniques on large industrialized farms. This form of farming strips the Earth of its nutrients… Read more »
U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance. Results from Surveys of Farmers, Ranchers and Consumers. Nationwide Surveys Reveal Disconnect Between Americans and Their Food. www.prnewswire.com/, 22 Sept. 2011. Web. 6 July 2017. As we look at the changes due to the specialization of labor in the industrial food change there are many notable benefits. After all, because of the specialization of labor we… Read more »
Have you ever wondered what kind of era or epoch we live in today? To be honest, I never have. We often hear the term, “end of an era”, but we hardly ever actually hear that era being labeled a specific word or term. For those of you who are now curious, we are currently living in the Anthropocene…. Read more »
The growth of the human population has always been centered on a civilization’s ability to cultivate crops. Regardless of the Malthusian or the Cornucopian perspective, the trend between the agricultural revolution and the growth of the human population directly parallels technological growth. In terms of sustainable systems most of the world is still in developmental stages today, giving us high… Read more »
One of the most interesting parts of this week’s readings was the video on order. The video described order as the less information it takes to describe something the more ordered it is. For example, in the video there are two metal bars one hot and one cold. The hot bar has molecules that are moving erratically while the… Read more »