Tag Archives: The Real Cost of Cheap Food

Is Whole Food’s Really Whole??

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As I went to get breakfast the other morning from the hot bar at Whole Foods I noticed something that I never took notice too before.  The scrambled eggs have citric acid listed in the ingredients.  I had just read Amanda Littles essay, “Cooking Oil: How Fossil Fuels Feed the World (and Energy Shortages Starve it).”  I was still trying… Read more »

Hungry Planet: USA & Ecuador

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The two photos I chose from Peter Menzel’s Hungry Planet are significantly different from one another. Photo one shows the Revis family, mom, dad, and two teenage boys, in North Carolina, USA . They spend $342 on food for one week. We can see from the photo that their food consists of a lot of processed food and take out…. Read more »

The Need for Access

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Social justice and equity are important areas of exploration in the political ecology of the world food system. Socioeconomic factors contribute greatly to resource and information access, and those in vulnerable circumstances seem to have significantly increased risk factors in both overall health and exposure to contaminants due to the food they consume. As Norah MacKendrick points out, for her… Read more »

I Think I Need a Garden!

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What is the real cost of cheap food?  In Michael Carolan’s book, The Real Cost of Cheap Food, he tries to answer this question by explaining chapter by chapter what we lose when we consume “cheap” food (anything mass produced and sold as affordable to the working class.)  Whether a country that produces cheap food or a human who consumes… Read more »

Cheap Food: Choice or Necessity?

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The average American citizen is overworked. Many people work full time (sometimes with more than one job), have family obligations, go to school, and attempt to have hobbies. All of this activity leaves little time to wonder about the food we are eating and the system we are contributing to when we make food choices. Many people leading this busy… Read more »

A great start to the day?

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My breakfast this morning was made possible by globalization. Banana chocolate chip pancakes are a standard at my local diner, so it can be hard to imagine a time when they were considered exotic, with their Ecuadorian bananas and chocolate chips made from ingredients sourced in the Ivory Coast. But transcending the limits of local climes and growing seasons, global… Read more »

Fair Trade Cacao, from the Congo to Seattle

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Colombian cacao

In The Real Cost of Cheap Food, Michael Carolan argues that “free trade is rarely fair” for smallholder farmers competing in the globalized food marketplace. The Fair Trade movement has risen in the last decade as a means of leveling the playing field for the developing world in trade relations. Seattle’s Theo Chocolate is a Fair Trade, bean-to-bar chocolate maker… Read more »