City and Food

TED - ideas worth sharing - City and Food

Food is a shared necessity - but also a shared way of thinking, argues Carolyn Steel. Looking at food networks offers an unusual and illuminating way to explore how cities evolved.

 
The question of how to feed cities may be one of the biggest contemporary questions, yet it's never asked: we take for granted that if we walk into a store or a restaurant, food will be there, magically coming from somewhere. Yet, think of it this way: just in London, every single day, 30 million meals must be provided. Without a reliable food supply, even the most modern city would collapse quickly. And most people today eat food of whose provenance they are unaware.

More about Carolyn Steel.

The true cost of food

We are going to talk about food and the true cost of food soon...



THE PROBLEMS WE'RE FACING

Food consumption is an area where individual decisions can make a difference; supply will follow demand and it's already happening. But first we need to look at the current landscape: The way food is produced and the way we eat create huge costs that are not reflected in our food bills.

Some are actual dollar amounts (subsidies and cleanup costs that we pay for in taxes);
some are damage to the environment (pollution and loss of wildlife habitat);
some are loss of quality of life (tasteless food, loss of the pleasure of preparing food and eating together); and
some are health issues (obesity, diseases, poor nutrition, contaminated food).

Agribusiness farms employ chemical-intensive systems that pollute land, air, and water. We transport much of our food from centralized factory farms instead of buying it from local sources which is a poor use of resources and a contributor to air and water pollution. We're losing our wild places because of wasteful agricultural practices such as uncontrolled grazing and fattening up animals with diets of factory-farm corn. Americans get much of their meat from pollution-causing factory farms and feedlots. More and more of our food production is controlled by a few large producers. Buying from small, independent producers allows us some input into how our food is grown.


Let us find the key words for this topic... demand, landscape, subsidies, pollution, fuel, free range, obesity, industrial farming etc.

This is a very useful site for ESL learners and teachers,  with Global Issues and Activism in English Language Teaching

Gabi