While reviewing Peter Menzel’s photographic essay “Hungry Planet”, I was struck by the dramatic differences in food culture between developing and affluent countries. For my paper, I wanted to find two countries that unparalleled each other. One of the countries I chose for my paper was Chad, a country that is extremely under developed and is facing a food crisis… Read more »
Guatemalans’ inability to break out of poverty is a direct relationship to the late 20th century global food and fuel price shocks that targeted the cost of imports that developing countries couldn’t keep up with (Clapp, 64). After the inflation of interest rates and import taxes on fuels in the 1970’s, the IMF and World Bank sought a remedy to… Read more »
Arrayed on the table before the Guatemalan Mendoza family was a colorful bounty of fresh food for the week – tomatoes, squash, carrots, green beans, garlic, potatoes, and among other things, two large burlap sacks full of grain. In sharp contrast, the Caven family from California were the beneficiaries of an industrialized food system which processes many of the raw… Read more »
Peter Menzel’s Hungry Planet depicts the various dietary and health lifestyles choices from various families around the globe. The Western diet, generally consisting of red meats, refined grains, processed foods, high fat and sugar content, as well as large food chains such as McDonalds have become popular making its way to countries like Japan, but not so much in countries… Read more »
When we think of the types of exports that, in this modern 21st century day and age, significantly shape or change the course of a nation(s), food is not at the top of the list. Most attention, especially in common news media, focuses on the big post-industrial power markets of things like oil, gold, coal, copper, diamonds, weapons, electronics and… Read more »
In contemplating living systems, it’s difficult to imagine that so many “dead” systems form relationships with human bodies that can bring such differences in how lives unfold. Humanity brings to life systems that are otherwise inert. It is easier for me to imagine how living systems theory works in an interactive way between organisms and the environment when I imagine… 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 »
Check out Tristram Stuart’s TED talk on the global food waste scandal. I felt that it really accentuated a large bounty of the political ecology of the world food system. It also touched upon Peter Quinn’s work in his article Hunger Games: Who Gets to Eat & Who Decides. Essentially, as Stuart described the modern-day realities of the world… 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 »
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 »