I want to talk about Bizarre foods in relation to food shortages for my adventure. I found this article and I was really interested in talking about the possibility of using untapped 'bizarre' food sources in countries such as America. I am referring specifically to insects, rodents, spiders, and other similar sources of unused calories. I found an Andrew Zimmerman video from his show, Bizarre Foods, that briefly discusses the option of rodents as a viable menu option or this video that discusses bugs. The article I found talks about food riots and how the imminence of a disaster depends on each seasons harvest. The problem is a global one, not always salient in American society. So my question do you think American could or would ever develop an interest in eating bizarre foods in order to help out the global food supply issues. I honestly don't know if I could change my eating habits so drastically but such a cause. Like most things the change would have to be gradual but as the Global food supply article suggests, we might not have much time. The green movement seems to be here to stay but would it go so far as to seek out bizarre foods? What are your thoughts?
These quotes are directly from the article--my highlights:
"For Malthus, famine was inevitable because the math of human existence did not add up: the means of subsistence grew only arithmetically (1, 2, 3), whereas population grew geometrically (2, 4, 8). By this analysis, food production could never catch up with fertility. Malthus was wrong, on both counts."
"The problem is not just the number of mouths to feed; it’s the quantity of food that each mouth consumes when there are no natural constraints."
"As of 2006, there were eight hundred million people on the planet who were hungry, but they were outnumbered by the billion who were overweight. Our current food predicament resembles a Malthusian scenario—misery and famine—but one largely created by overproduction rather than underproduction. Our ability to produce vastly too many calories for our basic needs has skewed the concept of demand, and generated a wildly dysfunctional market."
"What we are witnessing is not the end of food but a market on the brink of failure. Those bearing the brunt are, as in Malthus’s day, the people at the bottom."
"For Patel, it is a short step from Western consumers “engorged and intoxicated” with cheap processed food to Mexican and Indian farmers committing suicide because they can’t make a living. The “food industry’s pabulum” makes us all cogs in an evil machine."
"Too many years—and, in the West, too many subsidies—are invested in the setup of big single-crop farms to let producers abandon them when the going gets tough"
"Our insatiable appetites are not simply our own; they have, in no small part, been created for us. This explains, to a certain degree, how the world can be “stuffed and starved” at the same time, as Patel has it. The food economy has created a system in which some have no food options at all and some have too many options, albeit of a somewhat spurious kind."
"Pollan offers a model of how individual consumers might adjust their appetites: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” As a solution, this is charmingly modest, but it is unlikely to be enough to meet the urgency of the situation. How do you get the whole of America—the whole of the world—to eat more like Michael Pollan?"
"The good news is that one developing country has, in the past two decades, conducted a national experiment in a more sustainable food system, proving that it is possible to feed a population less destructively. Farmers gave up synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and replaced them with old-fashioned crop rotations and mixed livestock-crop operations. Big industrial farms were split into smaller coöperatives. The bad news is that the country is Cuba, which was forced to make the switch after the fall of the Soviet Union left it without supplies of agrochemicals. Cuba’s experiment depended on its authoritarian state, which commanded the “reallocation” of labor from cities to farms. Even on Cuba’s own terms, the experiment hasn’t been perfect. On May Day, Raúl Castro announced further radical changes to the farm system in order to reduce reliance on imports. Paul Roberts notes that there is no chance that Americans and Europeans will voluntarily adopt a Cuban model of food production. (You don’t say.) He adds, however, that “the real question is no longer what a rich country would do voluntarily but what it might do if its other options were worse.”"
This was really gross. I had trouble. -also got me really wondering about what the goals of shows like this really are... there has to be an "awe" factor involved because I feel like while the viewer is being persuaded to try something new, this video is also trying to scare people and gross them out. What this video really says to me is that people would eat things just to stun people, or surprise them, or simply to say that they did. --and those are mostly the wrong reasons, right?
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