In his Ted Talk, Tristam Stuart uses biscuits to illustrate the devastating reality of food waste from farm to table. Each biscuit represents a portion of the food at harvest. Stuart starts with ten biscuits and ends with four. The other six are tossed for cosmetic reasons, used for animal feed and trashed in supermarket dumpsters. He chastises the system… Read more »
From the past few weeks of reflection, I feel as though I’ve found an underlying theme of “if it were you and your family…what would you do?” If in the grand scheme of all in the world, if you knew that your actions such as over utilization of fertilizer that is poisoning the population or growing opium poppy that would… Read more »
Browsing and then deeply scanning through Hungry Planet, I was struck (but not surprised) by the difference in which the world eats. Sitting from my privileged vantage point, it is so easy to look for the processed versus unprocessed food, the quantity versus the quality. One would like to think that the developed world would have more… Read more »
What do people eat around the world and how much do they spend on their diet and how do they transport and prepare the food? are some of the questions that Peter Menzel, a photojournalist, set out to answer. In his photo-essay he captures the habits of families in different countries, cultures, and traditions by showing their family set-up, their… Read more »
Of all the contemplative practices we’ve done, the one that has stuck out to me the most is the one based on hunger. I’ve really only ever been dangerously hungry a few times, and usually it was out of negligence rather than a lack of food availability. That, in and of itself, speaks to the privilege I have of being… Read more »
This contemplative practice regarding living systems has made me do a great deal of thinking about the living systems which are most vulnerable due to the climate and geopolitical trends of the 21st century. Climate change in this century will have horrendous consequences for food and water systems throughout Africa, which provides the most shocking example of its potential effects… Read more »
When I was young, I thought I could live on chocolate. I probably would have tried without parental wisdom. As an adult, I think of chocolate as a decadent, cheeky treat that’s as accessible as a Twix from the office candy bowl. I told a friend of my new cocoa enlightenment. She quickly pointed out that I had, in fact,… Read more »
My post is in response to the Lesson 3 contemplative practice about chocolate and cocoa farms. I thought about how different the Hershey bar I had with me at home was made than the chocolate that was farmed on the Ivory Coast. We can simply buy chocolate for a few dollars at any store, and enjoy it while not having… Read more »
Politics and our aspiration to a high quality of life are sometimes at odds. In American culture, we are raised to believe that the improvement of the earth and our lives are entirely on our collective backs. In Maniates’ “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Ride a Bike, Save the World?” he speaks about the drops in the bucket from our individual… Read more »