{"id":285,"date":"2018-02-03T03:39:16","date_gmt":"2018-02-03T03:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385w18\/?p=285"},"modified":"2018-02-03T03:39:16","modified_gmt":"2018-02-03T03:39:16","slug":"i-think-i-need-a-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385w18\/2018\/02\/03\/i-think-i-need-a-garden\/","title":{"rendered":"I Think I Need a Garden!"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is the real<\/em> cost of cheap food?\u00a0 In Michael Carolan\u2019s book, The Real Cost of Cheap Food<\/em>, he tries to answer this question by explaining chapter by chapter what we lose when we consume \u201ccheap\u201d food (anything mass produced and sold as affordable to the working class.)\u00a0 Whether a country that produces cheap food or a human who consumes it, its source is unilaterally the same and requires the same amount of resources to produce & distribute it.<\/p>\n

If I had to choose the biggest loss to society in the production of \u201ccheap\u201d food it would be the nutritional quality of the food itself, the food\u2019s food-ness.\u00a0 We use perfectly edible, nutritious food to feed our livestock in order to churn out less nutritious meat product we distribute to our own citizens to their ultimate detriment.\u00a0 From a strictly humanitarian point of view it would seem more efficient and better for the development of our citizens to simply eat what the cows are eating and reap the caloric benefit.\u00a0 The question of why this isn\u2019t the case is mind-boggling (too much McDonalds before this post maybe?).<\/p>\n

Another downfall is the loss of market to small time farmers.\u00a0 The same thinking that helped the concept of the urbanization of food production as the future of the means to supply its citizens with a surplus of food is the same thinking that today results in the vast disparity between the means of production of food and the means to distribute that food on a global scale.\u00a0\u00a0In short, the assumption that the rural agricultural diaspora would find its new homeland in the city was met with an infrastructure capable of\u00a0housing these individuals but was incapable of providing the urban analog to their former profession.\u00a0\u00a0As it happens, the brains behind these theories were also responsible for policy at the highest levels.\u00a0\u00a0Indeed, while the elite planned over dinner whose ingredients were shipped from far flung regions, the cries of their poorest constituency went unheard.\u00a0 With so much negativity in the food industry, I feel like it’s best to grow my own food!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is the real cost of cheap food?\u00a0 In Michael Carolan\u2019s book, The Real Cost of Cheap Food, he tries to answer this question by explaining chapter by chapter what we lose when we consume \u201ccheap\u201d food (anything mass produced and sold as affordable to the working class.)\u00a0 Whether a country that produces cheap food or a human who consumes… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,7,24,25],"tags":[126,74,43,20,93,42,118],"class_list":["post-285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food-news","category-takeaway","category-week-2","category-week-3","tag-cheap-food","tag-farming","tag-food","tag-food-policy","tag-global-food-system","tag-health","tag-the-real-cost-of-cheap-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385w18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385w18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385w18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385w18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385w18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385w18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":286,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385w18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions\/286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385w18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385w18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385w18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}