Welcome to the blog - I hope you're hungry
Of all the topics that we teach, perhaps the most quotidian, everyday act which we can turn our critical attention to as geographers is the food we (choose to) consume.
Image: Alan Parkinson
It connects us with food cultures from across the globe, crops which have been taken from their original location sometimes without the permission of the place they originated, and hybridised and genetically modified over the centuries.
It connects us with the Global Food Supply System (GFSS) which was shown up by the COVID19 pandemic to be fragile, but which is trying to build resilience. It allows remote locations to still be part of a global system, but how sustainable is it when a country might export large amounts of cheese while also importing large amounts of cheese...
It connects us with the soil: our most precious resource but one which is not treated with enough care, and which can be lost in minutes despite taking centuries for each centimetre to form.
It connects us with the concept of sustainability as not all foods are equal in the carbon footprint they require to produce - which may be in vain because of the scale of global food waste.
It connects us with the habitats and biodiversity which are replaced by the monocultures necessary for mass production of cheap foodstuffs to feed an ever-growing global population.
It connects us with the agribusiness that produces a lot of our food, the oil palm plantations which , or the farmers who produce small scale artisanal products
Image: Alan Parkinson
I've written about this subject quite a lot over the years for a whole range of textbooks and other resources, and thought it was a suitable - and large enough - topic for a dedicated blog, which could grow over the coming years as I add more and more food stories.
From the introduction to Geographies of Food:"There is nothing more geographical than food. Eating connects us to the land, to animals, to technologies and virtual space, to ecological processes, and to other people both near and far, in multiple places and spaces and across multiple scales. It connects us into relationships of power, politics, and identity, questions of agency and structure, relations of inequality and (in)justice, and feelings of despair and hope.
Biting into an apple, a cassava, or a hamburger might connect you to your own backyard or garden, to a local, outdoor market, a complex refrigerated supply chain, or a landscape thousands of miles away. That same bite might tie you into networks of global food policy, international trade, urban activists working to create “food justice,” farmer-led movements to assert “food sovereignty,” or even to “happy cows” that ate grass and lived on pastures, rather than inside a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) or “factory farm.”
These food networks can be simple or complex, fair or unequal, “good” or “bad,” local or global—and sometimes many of these things at once."
Source: https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/geographies-of-food-9780857854575/
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