Have you ever kept track of the food you waste? I never paid much attention until I started teaching LIB320. I waste much more than I thought.
Here's a hands-on experiment for you this week. Keep track of what you throw away. I'll add a discussion under this one so we can keep track of everyone's uneaten food.
This week we looked at the Slow Food movement as a culture of resistance to globalization's destruction of traditional culture and values. Slow Food spawned several related ideas like the Local Food movement which focuses on eating local, seasonal, and sustainably grown food like that sold at farmers' markets (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_food
But many people doubt whether the sort of food sold at farmers' markets could realistically replace food grown on industrialized factory farms. Farmers' markets seem elitist and too small-scale. Small local farmers seem to produce a lower yield and have higher costs than giant corporate farms.
Could local farms really produce enough food to feed the world? And would that food be cheap enough for everyone to afford it?
Here is an article that discusses the Slow Food Movement http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/06/10/food-movement-rising/
Finally, here is a video series by Evan Fraserthat explores these issues and tries to give a moderate conclusion. “How Can We Feed 9 Billion People?
https://youtu.be/raSHAqV8K9
There are four other videos in this series exploring the four strategies Fraser mentions, but here is the most relevant one about local food systems:
What do you think? How can we solve the problem of feeding an ever-increasing world population in today's globalized economy? Do we need even bigger industrial farms? Or would supporting local farms be a more sustainable solution? Is the focus on local food too expensive, elitist, unrealistic, and inefficient?(As always, be sure to support your claims with relevant sources, personal examples and the videos and exercises from chapters 7 and 8).
Other samples, services and questions:
When you use PaperHelp, you save one valuable — TIME
You can spend it for more important things than paper writing.
