Tag Archives: Industrial Food System

A Living System at Each Level

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Each component of the global food system depends on a healthy planet. What is a healthy planet? It is not just the absence of air pollution, global warming, landfills, deforestation, oil spills, etc. A healthy planet, and therefore a healthy global food ecology (socially, politically, environmentally) also boils down to healthy dirt, nutrient-rich soil and water, microbial symbiosis… all sorts… Read more »

Making Aquaculture Sustainable…

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  “Aquaculture is a rapidly growing, highly valued and extremely important sector of the seafood industry. It is predicted that by 2030 it will account for more than 60% of global seafood production” (Dowle et al.). There are two basic forms of aquaculture, extensive systems and intensive systems.  Extensive systems are powered by the sun, have a relatively low environmental… Read more »

Industrial Farming

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Industrial farming has had an enormous impact on our environment and the world food system. In Leo Horrigan’s chapter in the May 2002 issue of Environmental Health Perspectives he stated, “Industrial agriculture depends on expensive inputs from off the farm (e.g., pesticides and fertilizer), many of which generate wastes that harm the environment” which reveals the high cost, both financially… Read more »

Industrial Meat Production

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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 »

The definition of order, and buying bread

  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 »

Does “Voting with Our Dollar” Really Make a Difference?

Both Michael Maniates’s “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Ride a Bike, Save the World?” and the book from our previous lesson, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food grapple with issues covered in systems theory- albeit in very different ways. Pollan’s book dismantles the reductionist theories that are ever-so-present in “nutritionism,” saying that foods are more than a sum of their vitamins,… Read more »

Thoughts on In Defense of Food

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  This was a very interesting lesson, I have been trying to eat healthier and learn about nutrition this past year. After reading the book many of the questions I had about health became clear. For example, why are there so many differing opinions on health? Because we don’t know as much as we think we do about nutrition. I… Read more »

Got Milk, Anyone?

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I was a child of a single father whose signature dishes included boxed mac’ and cheese with hotdogs and ramen noodle stir-fry. McDonald dinners were a regular occurrence. I carried this diet into my young adulthood. After taking a nutrition class during my first year in college, I was dismayed to find that most of what I considered food was… Read more »

A Relationship Worth Saving

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As a professional chef, avid world traveler, and conscious global citizen, analyzing the industrialization of food is of particular interest to me, and equal parts fascinating and disturbing. Humans’ relationship to the food they eat, for most of history, was based on what food was available in a given geographic area. That same type of relationship continued as humans became… Read more »