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 »
The Hungry Planet paper helped me to look closer at different countries and how they eat. It helped to show me how much different eating habits are across cultures, while also showing how similar others are. Families in Australia eat similar foods to the United States, where countries who do little importing eat very basic, raw type foods. It made… 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 »
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 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 »
“Apparently it’s easier, or at least a lot more profitable, to change a disease of a civilization into a lifestyle than it is to change the way that civilization eats.” Michael Pollan – In Defense Of Food More than anything else the connections between bad food, declining health and corporate profits stands out from our survey of the industrialization of… Read more »