2/25
Due to the weather being nuts, I replaced my day at Growing Gardens with academic work. I first started with watching a documentary on sustainable food systems, which I found on netflix, it was recommended to me from Sarah in a forwarded email from Martha Rosemeyer. I also did some reading of another ILC text. Unfortunately the Industrial Diet canceled out on the evergreen online library so I couldn’t finish reading it but I’ll provide some context to what I learned. Bummer because it seemed like a really interesting book!
Sustainable
- Marty Travis is the main character, he’s a farmer central Illinois who links with chefs on produce available that he grows and does self deliveries with. He quotes, “It’s more about the relationship than the rutabagas”
- The food system has become less about food and more about money, marketing and sale production
- An estimated 6.9 bil tons of soil are lost every year in U.S to erosion
- 91% of all cultivated land in Iowa is rotated between 2 crops: soybeans and corn
- Dan Barber (a farm to table chef) created a meal called Rotation Risotto. It is a nose to tail eating of the farm focusing on crops planted as rotation to go to animal feed, not consumed by humans. Ex) rye, buckwheat and cover crops
- Its harder to find younger farmers because it’s not something financially viable anymore, yet food is viable itself.
- Low fat foods usually mean it is higher in something else
- Fruits and veggies represent 6% of our agriculture. To make change you need to talk about grains, which are 75%
- We seperated agriculture into agri and culture
Food Tourism and Regional Development
- “From a regional development perspective, this book goes beyond culinary tourism to also look at some of the ways in which the interrelationships between food and tourism contribute to the economic, environmental and social well-being of destinations, communities and producers” (p. i)
- “It is partly for these sorts of reasons that Gössling and Hall (2013) suggested that tourism and hospitality, from both production and consumption perspectives, needed to be positioned in the context of a food system, what they referred to as a culinary system, in which food could be tracked from farm to plate (Figure 1.1) but which, from a sustainability perspective, has also been framed in a non-tourism fashion as a “local food system”” (p. 8)
- “Regional development: Use of the development potential of each area in order to stimulate a progressive adjustment of the local economic system to the changing economic environment. This is in opposition to the large industrial project (e.g. infrastructure, events) approach that often characterised traditional top-down development policies.” (p. 8)
- “Local food systems support long-term connections; meet economic, social, health and environmental needs; link producers and markets via locally focussed infrastructure; promote environmental health; and provide competitive advantage to local food businesses and brands” (p. 10)
- Food tourism can in turn cause the globalisation of food due to one experiencing another region specific food then importing to their own place of origin (p. 13)
- “Agribusiness has given consumers an unparalleled range of products from around the world virtually all year long, BUT However, this has come at significant environmental, economic and social cost (Lang 2010; Gössling & Hall 2013) with a loss of traditional farming systems and products, food diversity and increasing food insecurity in many locations as a result of lower local production and dependence on global food supply chains stretching thousands of kilometres” (p. 13)
The Industrial Diet
- Food over the past 150 years has become a commodity due to environment, power relations and social structures (p. 2)
- Industrial diet or american diet?? (p. 3)
- Losses in nutrients from industrialization has our genes fighting against us in premature deaths and disease, resulting from food (p. 6)