A few of food and nutrition-related items that have caught our attention recently. Do you have items you think we should include? Send links and brief descriptions to dberiss@gmail.com or hunterjo@gmail.com.
This week’s digest is late because here in South Africa there are massive student protests related to the many issues of rising costs to students, unequal access to education, and so much more. Of course, protesting students need food, and faculty have been showing their support by doing grocery shopping for the students who occupied the executive offices of our university. No articles on that yet, but I’ll keep looking!
Our big food story this week had a much lighter note: South Africans with smartphones (that is, everyone except me) were outraged to find out via a viral WhatsApp message that bananas were infected with HIV… except… wait…that can’t be, right? Right? Well, yeah. Bananas can’t be infected with HIV, and this is a pretty old hoax. But the rumours caused a serious enough panic that the National Department of Health had to issue a statement, entitled, “A malicious statement circulating about bananas and the ministry of health” (yes, I did have to include the full title of the statement) assuring the public that they could, in fact, continue to eat bananas. Whew.
Although the banana story may seem like a bizarre anecdote depicting our own gullibility (and something about social media), I wonder if it speaks to common fears about a global, opaque and disconnected food supply, where all the unknowns that big agriculture make anything seem possible. The scale of big agriculture was depicted recently in a NYTimes Series “Can Big Food Change”, with one article showing these grand pictures of large-scale food production.
In this age of global food, people spend a lot of time fighting to retain the unique story, taste and quality of their food, as described in this story from The Atlantic of a specific brand of East German pickles. Global agriculture has also led to a rapid decrease in the number of species of foods we consume, yet there’s also a vast array of foods that have spread from continent to continent, as described in this article about the spread of African crops.
Connecting big agriculture, diet, and climate change is a hot topic, and rightly so, given the major part that agriculture plays in global warming. This week, there was an article in The Guardian about the potential high yields of agroecological farming, arguing that current farming practices in BigAg are not the only way to feed the world. Also in The Guardian was an article about the UN recommendation to decrease meat consumption for the sake of the planet. Indeed, eating less meat is one way of decreasing the emissions related to agriculture. Civil Eats writes about a study relating U.S. masculinity and meat consumption, with the conclusion that men shouldn’t need meat to feel manly, but they might currently feel like they do given a broader social context.
Lastly, check out this wonderful article about high quality bread in the face of war in Syria.
Have you written something interesting about food this week? Tell us about it!
FoodAnthropology 