While reading about the cause of the Irish and Indian famines this week which killed millions of people, I continually asked myself, “How could they so brazenly end these people’s lives?” How could a few powerful people so apathetically decide the fate for millions of innocent people. As I wondered about this question something struck me and I wondered, is… 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 »
The contemplative practice that I found to be the most interesting was the lesson on the production of chocolate. Chocolate is one of the most well known commodities in our culture. It’s heavily sought after by consumers during significant holidays, it’s the perfect gift for a loved one, and we add it to various foods such as cakes and ice… 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 »
It might seem a bit random, but the reading that we have done thus far in class has actually brought to mind for me feminist issues. One might not think that feminism and food have much to do with each other, but I see a direct link to it in comments such as Michael Carolan’s about possessing sufficient time to… Read more »
Human thinking tends to adhere to a default framework of linear causality and predictable outcomes, often at the expense of insight and resilience. Similarly, human-created systems are often constructed according to linear thinking and a centralized structure model. In practice, both natural and human-made systems often present complexity in the form of nonlinearity that cannot be predicted or accounted for… 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 »
The Anthropocene, encompassing our impact on the world’s ecosystem and climate through human action, stands out to me in a very polarizing way, in that we have clearly monumentally altered the course of earth, and yet there is this vulnerability to the entire process that is screaming for attention. For one thing, as Michael Carolan discusses in The Real Cost… 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 »