food

This chapter provides empirical evidence about the importance of local organizations for sustaining food systems, livelihoods, and the environment.

For the past 60 years, mainstream neoliberal policy has encouraged and justified the elimination of small-scale food producers in both industrially developed and developing countries. This process of undermining and eliminating small-scale food producers is linked with the expansion of a development model that considers small and medium-scale farming, artisanal fishing, nomadic pastoralists, and indigenous communities to be outside “modernity.” This chapter uses the latest information available to summarize the high social and environmental costs of this model of development.

Taking a historical, cross-cultural, and trans-disciplinary perspective, this e-book includes some of the most recent references in the scholarly and policy literature on food, agriculture, environment, and livelihoods. The photos and the embedded video clips, animations, and audio recordings show farmers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, fishers, food workers, urban farmers, and consumers all working to promote food sovereignty, highlighting the importance of locally controlled food systems to sustain people and nature in a diversity of rural and urban contexts.

Gesellschaft und Ernahrung is a lavishly illustrated catalog of an exhibition on the history of food that ran at the Food Museum in Vevey, Switzerland, in 2000.

This fictional drama is inspired by Eric Schlosser’s nonfiction book of the same name. Both explore the complex realities behind that staple of American fast food, the burger—from the slaughterhouse, via the laboratory, to the shop counter.

This exploration of the deepening crisis of food security in India looks at four case studies, dealing respectively with Punjab, Warangal, Kalahandi, and Bellary. These are interspersed by insights into a movement in the Himalayas that may offer alternatives in the form of sustainable agricultural systems, which revive traditional agricultural practices (Beej Bachao Andolan).

This film profiles the work of Eckart Irion, German researcher and cultivator of new types of grain. He uses natural selection to develop his own seeds for growing rye, wheat, and oats.

The film discusses how biodynamic agricultural methods transformed an area of desert 60 kilometers northeast of Cairo, and a leading agro-industrial corporation was founded.

A sobering contribution to the food versus fuel debate and an equally poignant exposé of the human and environmental impacts of European policy on biofuels.

An interdisciplinary explanation of why Europeans and people of European descent have come to control so much of the world’s wealth.