Architect Carolyn Steel gives a TED talk on how city transportation infrastructure defines the food we eat. She shows evolution of London food supply routes: from river, hoof, and foot, to railroad, cars, and airplanes. A part of the evolution is a drastic change in food packaging, production scale, and consumption patterns.
Several points I'd like to note:
- meat and urbanism are rising hand in hand;
- feeding animals to feed them to humans takes 10 times more food;
- takes 10 calories [of fuel] to produce 1 calorie of food in the West;
- half the food grown in the US is thrown away;
- a billion of us is obese.
She proposes food localization as a solution the all these problems, but I don't believe it will work, unless people are willing to pay much higher prices for their food. And we've already seen revolutions in the Arab world, particularly in Egypt, when a spike in food prices occurred.
Here's the video, but if you don't have 20 minutes you can read a full transcript of the talk (on the right of the video on the site).
tags: distribution, payload, health, system, evolution, problem
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