Agriculture Reference
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in whih food becomes a quantiiable input to human health. hey argue that the
human preference for high energy foods and to gorge on excess, as well as the meta-
bolic rift that obscures the impacts of food production on environment and society,
contributed to the subsequent replacement of diverse diets with those dominated by
a limited set of high-energy foods and synthesized nutritional supplements. Stok
and Carolan illustrate the implications of the underlying quantification of the global
food system on shared expectations of the ahievement of a better society. he uto-
pian aspiration to supply a sufficient quantity to feed the world detracts from the
qualities of food, whih they argue can contribute to utopian perspectives that better
aknowledge the moral imperatives of accessible and healthy food for the world. We
will return to this point later in this conclusion.
In summary, the irst part of the topic outlines the case for why the business-as-
usual model is not working. The combination of political manipulation of food and
the cultural transformation of everything into numbers hides our collective inability
to feed the hungry. The final, and possibly most damaging, aspect is the belief that
food should be heap - squeezing farmers at home and abroad but also underwriting
the proitable expansion of a disenhanting, commoditized global market for food.
One of the longest, consistent trajectories since the Industrial Revolution has been
the decreasing proportion of household income spent on food - economists call this
Engel's Law. Commencing with around 85 per cent of poor-household income being
spent on food in the 1880s, the slow and continual heapening of the relative cost
of food to households in the Developed World plateaued only recently, with the US
reahing a low point of around 10 per cent of income being spent on food. Yet, the
underlying truth of Engel's Law is that food just can't keep getting heaper forever.
If we have reahed the point of reversal of Engel's Law, this will prove to be devast-
ating for many aspects of the business-as-usual model in the world food system.
While the first part identifies a poorly functioning food system, the second be-
gins to identify the opportunities for hange and the constraints to alternative food
production practices. If the dominant business-as-usual model is broken, is there one
alternative model or a range of options waiting to replace it? None of the authors in
this part would argue that their case study demonstrates a singular solution to what
ails the food system at a global level. Eah does, however, ofer insight to the hal-
lenges faced particularly at the site of production in the global food system.
In their hapter, Geof Lawrence, Carol Rihards, Ian Gray and Naomi Hansar
paint a pessimistic picture of local response and adaptation to the hanging climate
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