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 »
Each contemplative practice in this course so far has been the part of the lesson that I look forward to the most. It’s a way for me to digest the information from the week, and put it into perspective in regards to my own thoughts and feelings. While each contemplative practice has forced me to think critically about each issue,… Read more »
International trade allows us access to fruits, vegetables, spices, and much more from other countries around the world. There are so many foods in our markets, grocery stores, and restaurants that we take for granted. The number of resources, work, travel, etc. that goes into producing goods elsewhere and bringing them to the United States is not noticed by many of… Read more »
Chocolate most commonly is found in dark, milk, and white varieties, each with its own unique flavor, and most people have their own preferences as to what they like best. For me it’s all about milk chocolate, especially when it accompanies peanut butter, and that could be ice cream or the coveted Reese’s peanut butter cups. Chocolate is a commodity I have apparently taken for granted over… Read more »
The contemplative practice that I found to be most inspiring was the one about cocoa beans and chocolate. In this practice, we thought about where the beans come from and the process that is used to get the beans to facilities to make the sweet snack that we consume often. Thinking about the work it takes to get to grow… Read more »
I am no stranger to hunger. I have struggled alot during my life to control the impulses to eat, separating the actual hunger from the other emotional impulses. This contemplative practice may serve to connect people to the feeling of hunger, as alot of people have forgotten what it truly feels like. But even then, that is up to personal… 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 carbon footprint we are collectively leaving on the world is actively and increasingly destabilizing the climate (Litfin) and the severity of human intervention in nature and natural processes has created equally severe consequences that need to begin reversal, if that is even possible. In Lester Brown’s Full Planet, Empty Plates, he highlights the effects of exponential human population growth… Read more »
Through watching the first couple videos about the complexities of systems and systems theory, I found myself asking, how can I make the connection from systems to food? Understanding that systems are made up of interworking parts, input and output energy, and have complex reactions with the environment was easy for me to process. But what I found difficult to… Read more »
“There will be 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who were not there last night— many of them with empty plates.” – L.R. Brown1 Think about that for a minute… Every single day on average there are more than two hundred thousand more mouths to feed than the previous day. That’s eighty million more people each year. One might… Read more »