My sister and the so-called "food crisis"
Look, clearly Madeleine knows her food. Just check out the witty blog she and her friends have: c is for kitchen. You'd never know she refused to eat anything coloured until she was 12. (Sorry M, but what one hand giveth...)
And now I've even used her hardened cynicism to open an article about the food crisis in the Nov/Dec Canadian Dimension magazine (a review essay about two great books, The Global Food Economy by Tony Weis, and--yup--Good Crop/Bad Crop by Devlin Kuyek) :
On the phone with my sister Madeleine recently, I told her I was doing some background research on the global food crisis. “Hunger’s never a crisis,” she said. And she was right. The more we learn about the roots of the latest spike in food prices, the more obvious it becomes that hunger is really a predictable feature of our agricultural system. At root, the question “How do we feed everyone?” is really the question “How should we grow our food?”
As it happens, two sharp and accessible Canadian books released in the last couple of years skilfully explain how we got into this mess, and how we can get out. Though it may be trendy for urban lefties to focus on urban agriculture and other small-scale projects that could change our relationship to food, these authors take a vital step back to consider the big, rural systems that actually produce most of the food we eat — and will keep doing so for the forseeable future.
[read on]
But seriously, urban trendies in tight jeans don't have it all wrong--some might just be too modest with scale. At least, this is the point I try to make at the end at the article. (Neither of the books actually mentions such creatures, but I rarely think about anyone else.)


