What did you learn about dietary choices from using the footprint calculator? Now imagine that you could translate what you learned into an effective societal policy on food- what would it be? And how would this policy effect the need to alleviate world hunger?
925 million people on earth do not have enough to eat according to the FAO [Food and Agricultural Organization]. That's almost 1 in 7 inhabitants of our planet!
Food & Hunger >
How do we not run out of food?
I was scrolling through my email today and came across this video http://video.nationalgeographic.com/vid … day-ngfood that National Geographic distributed to commemorate the 33rd anniversary of World Food Day. They posed two questions in their distribution: How do we feed nine billion people by 2050, and how do we do so sustainably? I have learned that there are several ways in which we are not maximizing our food production. One of the largest problems is people's consumption of meat. It takes much more land to produce a calorie of steak, for example, than to produce a calorie of rice. With limited fertile land suitable for farming, and an effort to stop converting more natural landscapes into farm land, we should be producing more grains, fruits, and vegetables for human consumption and less to feed animals and then in turn feed us. Each step that we get away from our food source, we are wasting more land and energy. Additionally, sustainable farming practices should be mandated globally. Examples of these practices include no-till farming, planting legumes to perform nitrogen fixation, and insuring that crops are always planted in open farm land to prevent the loss of topsoil which makes the land infertile.
This is also a very interesting link from National Geographic that compares the diets of regions around the world http://www.nationalgeographic.com/what- … gn=Content. I would recommend checking out the National Geographic series "The Future of Food."