The far reaching impacts of climate change on our food security, economic stability, and social inequality is nothing less than overwhelming. Food industries across the globe will have to grapple with the multifaceted impacts of climate change. From the decreased yields seen in commercial fishing due to ocean acidification, to the increasing widespread draughts, there is a shift towards scarcity…. Read more »
In recent times there has been an increase in awareness of the downsides associated with industrial agriculture. The loss of soil, inefficient water and resource usage, toxic chemicals, poorly regulated GMO’s, and the inhumane environments for animals. With such a long list of skeletons, it’s no wonder that a range of movements to shift away from this system have… Read more »
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 »
On February 6th, Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched and landed the Falcon Heavy rocket. One of the purported goals of SpaceX is to “make life multiplanetary,” locating and extracting resources in space. What happens when we apply the lessons of the biofuel boom and the 2008 world food crisis to SpaceX? This massive investment of earthly resources may not yield… Read more »
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 »
Our world food system is broken. The evidence of this is most apparent in the ironic stories of food culture on our divided planet. Developed countries produce many times more food than needed to feed their populations, the US produces 4 times its needed calories (Stuart, TED), while developing nations struggle to produce enough to feed their hungry populations. Indigenous… Read more »
Much of the food we eat takes an interesting journey to get to our plates. The supply chain that brings us our food is often indirect; the path between producers and consumers can be circuitous, with many people and stops in between. In this industrial food system, it’s rare to think about the small farmer in Africa or elsewhere that… 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 »
Hunger is a biological state that practically all humans experience in their lifetime, to varying degrees. In contemplating the experience of hunger, I was struck by the universality of the sensation. It is an issue that has persisted, unsolved and unchanged, throughout human history. On a global scale, an overwhelming range of complex forces and feedback loops are at work in… Read more »
A contemplative practice that resonated with me was the exercise on hunger. My experience with hunger has always been associated with dieting or self-restriction for weight loss. My problem wasn’t the availability of food, it was the overabundance of it, and my own lack of discipline with eating. That deeply contrasts with the experience of hunger for most people in… Read more »