Category Archives: Week 5

BLOG POST 3: On any Contemplative Practice

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Lesson 05 Guided Contemplative Practice: Feeling Hunger was too spiritual for me and I strongly dislike the word “hunger” was used metaphorically; i.e. Einstein’s quote. Considering the gravity of malnutrition and hunger, I am dismayed we sit thinking about ourselves instead of ways to reduce food waste or increase access to food.

A New Food Revolution

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In Amanda Little’s essay, Power Trip, she examines the ways in which fertilizers, coupled with the seed engineering breakthroughs of the Green Revolution have brought us agricultural abundance. And yet, being able to feed an expanding population has also produced many practices that have put strain on the environment and come at a cost to other living systems. Little explores… Read more »

More Than Biscuit Crumbs

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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 »

Food an Power

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The world food system is complex, intricate, and interacts with many factors (i.e. political, environmental, climate, etc.). It isn’t a simple solution to provide equitable food for all. One underlying theme throughout the past lessons is desire for power. Affluent countries hold a lot of power because of their access to advanced technology, ability to produce agriculture, and access to… Read more »

Hunger would be starving without Waste

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  Hunger is in effect a systemic issue. Our media over simplifies it to a lack of food or resources when we must in-fact look at a broader system that changes how and why there is hunger in a world where we have enough food to feed everyone. There are an assortment of complex variables at play. First we see… Read more »

A Sampling of Food Ethics

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The realities of the world food system carry emotional and moral weight. Images of hunger to the point of starvation, especially of children, is not just difficult to see, but difficult to know exist at this very moment around the world. The statistics and numbers are one aspect, but the level of suffering that is ongoing before the statistical metric… Read more »

Hope and Change

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The common threads I found running through the concepts of hunger, food and energy, and climate change were feelings of both deep foreboding and indomitable hope. It’s really easy as a young person to focus on the main problems we are going to have to tackle with respect to these issues—how will we feed not only the starving people around… Read more »

Fast & Easy

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The rise of sugar as a regular staple in households worldwide is a fascinating example of how the world’s food has changed significantly. Sugar, once a highly coveted luxury item, is now the opposite – available in high volumes in every packaged good sold on the shelves of corner markets globally. The history of sugar demonstrates the “social, political, and… Read more »

Triple Inequality- Indonesia

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I enjoyed reading Karen Litfin’s work in “Thinking Like a Planet.” It goes along with some of the questions I have been asking about using Earth Systems to inform human systems, making them circular rather than linear. It was nice to see ideas and examples of how it is being done, such as virtuous cycles rather than vicious cycles. I… Read more »

Triple Inequality- Fiji

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The developing and middle income countries feel the affects of climate change the most. These countries face “triple inequality” they are less responsible for climate change, they are more impacted by it, and they have less capacity to adapt to problems that happen because of climate change. I am going to focus on one country Fiji. I read an article… Read more »