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 »
“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 »
(Source: https://www.parenthub.com.au) The meat industry has continuously grown into a highly commercialized one. In fact, it is amazing that the cruelty continues to be treated as a norm as animals are harvested just to satiate human desires. The Anthropocene makes a good point in theorizing the trend of global impact, especially based on human growth and human behavior. One… Read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
In Michael Pollan’s book In the Defense of Food, his observation that people have become more sickly, more overweight, and less healthy since the inception of the social craze of nutritionism (81) is incredibly interesting. The opposite is suggested by the concept of nutrition, so how could this have happened? With a heavier focus on nutrition in society, or at… Read more »
Food is one of the basic needs of everyone. The problem here is when food becomes so integrated into the industrialized process, people forget to understand the ethics behind what they are doing. While I appreciate how the industrialization process as an important notion in providing for the many, I feel that the process on animals is very inhumane because… Read more »
The past couple weeks of our lessons have inspired me to think about how much of our current diet is necessary. I have wondered if we need all the food we are eating and if we do, are we even get enough nutrition from the food in an average American diet. My partner and I currently switched 30% of our… Read more »