Welcome to Our Course

Food is simultaneously political and ecological: it is about who gets what, when and how; and it depends upon ecosystems, even as it alters them. Since we eat formerly living organisms, we might even think of food as the environment we eat. The current world food system feeds 7.5 billion people—inequitably, to be sure, and with tremendous ecological and public-health implications. On the one hand, it represents a phenomenal human achievement; on the other, this feat rests upon a vast web of social, political, cultural and biophysical interdependencies—some more resilient than others. The world food system is a complex socio-ecological system with planetary reach. How did we get here? Who eats and who doesn’t—and why? Who wins and who loses? What are the trends? What might we expect in light of the converging challenges of population growth, rising affluence, climate change, freshwater scarcity, and soil depletion? Our course addresses these and many other questions but we also focus on a more intimate set of questions often overlooked in the study of world politics: Who are we in relation to all of this? How does our participation in the world food system affect our sense of identity, agency, and responsibility? Welcome to one key dimension of our collective learning adventure: our course blog!