In past lessons, I have had a general idea of the concepts from previous knowledge, but was given a much deeper insight into the issues through this course. This week however, was completely new to me. I really had no idea that petroleum has such a major impact on the world food system, and that this plays a big part in the effect on the environment and public health as well. The entire food system is dependent on petroleum and fossil fuels.<\/p>\n
For example, in the article \u201cHow Oil Prices Affect the Price of Food\u201d, Carbon writes, \u201cModern agriculture uses oil products to fuel farm machinery, to transport other inputs to the farm, and to transport farm output to the ultimate consumer. Oil is often also used as input in agricultural chemicals\u201d. Carbon then explains how the price of food is therefore largely dependent on the price of the oil being used. Using the systems theory, we can see that each part of the cycle effects the next part, from the start of the food system in the soil, to the end of it, at the consumer. This dependency of the food system on oil can also be used to explain the world food crisis of 2008. In this week\u2019s lecture Liftin explains how high oil prices led to biofuel subsidies, which then resulted in hunger.<\/p>\n
In response to this, I think if an initiative was made to encourage people to eat locally, and sustainably, and support farm to table, plant-based diets, it would eliminate the absolute necessity of oil in the world food system. Policies could be implemented as well to regulate the prices of oil particularly for major farmers and for transportation of food to places where it\u2019s needed most, such as Africa.<\/p>\n
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In past lessons, I have had a general idea of the concepts from previous knowledge, but was given a much deeper insight into the issues through this course. This week however, was completely new to me. I really had no idea that petroleum has such a major impact on the world food system, and that this plays a big part… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,1],"tags":[233],"class_list":["post-762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food-movements","category-uncategorized","tag-foodandoil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=762"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":897,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762\/revisions\/897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}