Food Studies

In the last decade, the world has grown richer and produced more food than ever before. Yet in that same period, hunger has increased and 925 million remain underfed and malnourished. This volume offers a glimpse into how the simple aspiration of global food security has evolved and unfolded--with sometimes contradictory and counterproductive policies, agendas, and ideologies.

Mangos from India, pasta from Italy, coffee from Colombia: Every day, we are nourished by a global food system that relies on our planet remaining verdant and productive. But current practices are undermining both human and environmental health. while people go hungry, and more than thirty percent of food being wasted when it could feed the 795 million malnourished worldwide. In Nourished Planet, the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition plots a map towards food for all, food for sustainable growth, food for health, and food for culture. With these ingredients, we can nourish our planet and ourselves.

In the past few years, governments and philanthropic foundations began redoubling efforts to resuscitate agricultural research and technology transfer, as well as to accelerate the modernization of food value chains to deliver high quality food inexpensively, faster, and in greater volumes to urban consumers. But will these efforts suffice? This volume explores the complex relationship between food security and sociopolitical stability up to roughly 2025. The means by which governments, firms, and private philanthropies tackle the food security challenge of the coming decade will fundamentally shape the relationship between food security and sociopolitical stability.

It's a perverse fact of modern life: There are more starving people in the world than ever before, while there are also more people who are overweight. To find out how we got to this point and what we can do about it, Raj Patel launched a comprehensive investigation into the global food network. It took him from the colossal supermarkets of California to India's wrecked paddy-fields and Africa's bankrupt coffee farms, while along the way he ate genetically engineered soy beans and dodged flying objects in the protestor-packed streets of South Korea. Yet he also found great cause for hope--in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable and joyful food system. Going beyond ethical consumerism, Patel explains, from seed to store to plate, the steps to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of both farmers and consumers, and rebalance global sustenance.

A deeply human-centered perspective on the origins of America's food Where Am I Eating? bridges the gap between global foodproducers and the American consumer, providing an insightful lookat how our eating habits affect farmers and fishermen around theworld. Imports account for eighty-six percent of America's seafood, fifty percent of its fresh fruit, and eighteen percent of its fresh vegetables. Where Am I Eating? examines the effects of this reliance on those who supply the global food economy. This book takes a human-centered approach to food, investigating the lives of the people at the other end of the global food economy, observing the hope and opportunity--or lack thereof--that results from our reliance on imports.

Wenonah Hauter runs an organic family farm in Northern Virginia that provides healthy vegetables to over five hundred families. Despite this, as one of the nation's leading healthy food advocates, Hauter believes that the local food movement is not enough to solve America's food crisis and the public health debacle it has created. In Foodopoly, she takes aim at the real culprit: the massive consolidation and corporate control of food production, which prevents farmers from raising healthy crops and limits the choices that people can make in the grocery store.