When we take a minute to look at these pictures side by side, several differences begin to show. The pictures show an American family and Egyptian family with the food they will consume in a week. The thing that first jumps out to me is the types of food that each family chooses to eat for a week. This… Read more »
In week 3, we discussed how chocolate gets from the cacao farms on the Ivory Coast, to the neatly packaged commodity that we all know and love. As images of children, taken from their families as slave laborers, were shown performing the difficult tasks of harvesting cacao beans, my heart sank. As we learned that farmers, who are underpaid, had… Read more »
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 »
Why do Afghans grow grapes if there are so many reasons not to? Wine is illegal there; they don’t have many refrigerators to keep grapes fresh; and it’s a hard crop to grow in many ways. But if you lay the grapes out on your rooftop to bake in the sun, you’ll eventually find a reason to grow grapes in… Read more »
While food is clearly a crucial aspect of living, it seems that it has become so engrained into our (American’s) everyday lives that it is often not thought about in a deeper level. The role of food in our society and how it has, in a way, controlled our lives since the very beginning of our kind it quite thought… Read more »
What was my grandmother eating? This is the question posed by Michael Pollan’s book, and is a query I found myself investigating. For me, I transposed the question onto my grandfather, who grew up on a farm. This farm, on which the family subsisted throughout the Great Depression, allotted him a status as a young man that few in South… Read more »