Food Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Food Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

We must eat in order to survive. Food contains energy, vitamins, and nutrients necessary for the human body to function properly. But people’s eating habits vary considerably from one region and cultural sphere to another.

One reason behind this diversity is the global variation of the natural environment. The earth has a myriad of variably sized habitats and ecosystems, which affect the availability of foodstuffs. For example, people residing along waterways and coasts have traditionally eaten more fish than those living inland. Human curiosity, mobility, and the subsequent exchange of ideas and goods has greatly diversified these patterns. New food items and ways of preparing and consuming food have typically spread along trade routes, landing in the primary centers of exchange.

The dependency of cities on a continuous food supply from the countryside has further shaped the regional patterns of food production. Land around cities is typically more valuable, which directs agricultural production in these areas toward laborintensive, easily perishable food items that need to reach their urban markets and processing facilities without delay. One example of this regional differentiation per land value, production costs, and demand is the dairy and vegetable production “belt” around the cities in the Great Lakes area and eastern seaboard in the United States. Meat, corn, and wheat can be produced farther away, on cheaper land, but still within good transportation connections to processing plants and urban centers.

Urban settlement is a direct result of agriculture. For an estimated 2.5 million years, humans lived as hunters and gatherers. The gradual development ofagriculture enabled them to give up their nomadic lifestyles and cluster in settlements. The earliest evidence of planted crops include rice in what today is South Korea (about 15,000 years ago) and figs in the Jordan River Valley in the Middle East (11,000-12,000 years ago). Dogs, goats, pigs, and sheep were among the first domesticated animals.

Surplus food produced by the land encouraged a differentiation of tasks and increased trade between the settlements. Specialized professionals, such as makers of tradeable goods, administrators, merchants, and soldiers, were supported by the producers of food. Food thus became a strategic resource, guaranteeing survival, increased prosperity and power. The saying, “armies marching on their stomachs,” is well known, for only well-fed troops stay healthy, disciplined, and capable of efficient combat. Mighty cities have fallen after their supply of food has been cut off and their defenders have faced starvation to death.

Globalization

The trade of food between cities and countries expanded the scale of movement and business transactions, paving the way for what today is called globalization. Early international traders, such as the Greek and the Venetians, introduced new food items and their preparation methods to domestic and foreign lands. The colonization of the New World by Europeans added to the selection of spices and luxury consumables in Europe. “Fashion foods” in Europe of the era included New World drinks such as cocoa, tea, and coffee, and several fruits, which all led to innovations in kitchenware, serving styles, and socializing. As result of this globalization of food, diets, customs, landscapes, habitats, and economies changed dramatically on a global scale.

The commercial exchange and related rivalry between the world’s superpowers created unstable dependencies, the legacy of which is still present in global politics and economy. Huge parcels of conquered land were turned into producers of raw materials and were designed to serve the needs of colonial masters. This production of export-serving “cash crops” often impoverished soils, homogenizing and limiting local agricultural production. The former colonies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America now have political independence, but their national economies may still depend on the production and trading patterns created during the colonial-imperial era. The contemporary world is highly unbalanced and unequal from the perspective of food production, distribution, and consumption. While some countries struggle to feed their population and children grow up malnourished, others try to resolve problems of overproduction and life-threatening obesity.

Food now travels across the globe faster and more comprehensively than ever before. Industrial mass production, trade, technological innovations, and expedient transportation and communication networks support a complex worldwide food system of supply and demand. Ease of travel allows for new culinary experiences, acquiring of tastes, and production of new customer demand. Migrants introduce new foods and foodways to their host populations, and create new demand for imports. A variety of import and export companies, specialty restaurants and corner groceries have sprung up in urban centers, diversifying local culinary landscapes. For the wealthy, everything is available all the time: fresh tropical fruit are sold year-round in developed countries, and beef from Brazil and lamb from New Zealand compete with domestic meat production in many European countries. Seasonality and food storage and transportation challenges have diminished significantly over the past few decades. Change has accelerated, as simultaneous global, local, homogenizing, and diversifying forces complement one another and individuals, goods, and ideas move to create global flows and patterns.

Boundaries and Identity

The concerns and the tightening control over imports, exports, and national boundaries point to the con-tinuous strategic importance of food and food safety to national interests. National governments seek to maintain self-sufficiency, reducing their dependency on outside supplies and guaranteeing continuity and quality of the domestic food supply.

Food-related safety concerns is a factor dividing the world into nation-states, countering some trends of globalization. Attention has turned toward local and regional production as an environmentally sustainable alternative to longer food chains, as a way to support employment, and as an expression of local, regional, and national feelings of belonging. This illustrates the importance of food for human identity.

Particular food items and foodways have thus gained strength as markers of local, regional, or even national pride and as profilers of their production regions. The European Union supports local and regional specialties in its member countries by protecting their name, traditional method of preparation, or geographical origin: Feta cheese of Greece, the prosciutto ham of Parma, Italy, and the Jersey Royal potatoes of Britain. In the United States, placespecific food associations include Maine lobsters, Idaho potatoes, and the Philly cheesesteak sandwich. Culinary hybrids created through cultural contacts and experimentation have become integrated into “national” cuisines. For example, the stereotypical dishes of “Mexican” and “Japanese” food were first invented in the United States, then introduced to those countries whose cuisine they are perceived to represent. “National cuisines” are illusions in a sense that they typically are collections of regional specialties and imported ingredients, preparation methods, and dishes, which continue to evolve. However, they maintain strong national profiles, reputations, and stereotypes, such as Italians living on pasta and an English meal as incomplete without brown gravy and pudding.

Customs Shaped by Environment

Availability and customs steered by the environment (for example, preservation by drying, salting, or immersion in vinegar or oil) have influenced ideas of desirability and acceptability. The same consumer may be disgusted by one rodent (rat), but happily eat others (rabbit, hare, guinea pig). The same fish may be tasty for one person when seasoned with salt and vinegar, but will not go down dried.

The variety and relativity of food-related customs, preferences, and taboos confirm that these practices are historically, socio-culturally, and environmentally conditioned. Most Europeans and North Americans would typically not eat insects or dogs, but grasshoppers are a salty street snack in parts of Asia and Latin America, and a particular dog breed makes a prestigious specialty in parts of Asia. A variety of meats produced by other domesticated animals, crabs, mussels, snails, and frogs are delicacies for one, but disgust another. These boundaries are very strong.

For example, it is hard to see that the controlled farming of rats would help solve the world’s protein deficiencies, even if the omnivorous, quickly reproducing rodent might be environmentally, ethically, and economically more sustainable than large, slowly reproducing and selectively eating farm animals. At the same time, preferences for particular types of fish and meats, and related economic profits, repeatedly lead to crossing of sustainable and ethnical boundaries, shaking the delicate ecological balance of entire ecosystems in particular areas and treating sentient beings as industrial commodities.

Inequitable Distribution

It is clear that the range of options and ability to choose are very unevenly distributed across the world. Whereas fashion foods and consumer boycotts may be routine for the privileged wealthy, much of the world’s population still focuses on daily survival. Population growth, natural and humaninduced environmental disasters, the complex legacies of colonialism and imperialism; and contemporary world politics and economies keep entire countries on the threshold of major humanitarian disasters. In many areas, the sustainable limits of the local environment have been exceeded and the balance may tip over from scarcity to starvation.

Dependency on exportable raw materials, outdated technology, immediate economic and human needs, political instability, unequal land ownership, and commercial greed complicate the improvement of these conditions and interfere with emergency preparedness. Emergency measures, such as international food aid, often come late, may create new dependencies, and cannot replace preventive, long-term approaches to sustainable development. Droughts, fires, overgrazing, overfishing, salinization of irrigated lands, and disastrous cases of mishandling hazardous or sensitive materials exemplify that a variety of natural and human hazards can affect any society, often sending cumulative shock waves across the world.

Bibliography:

Harvey A. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table (Oxford University Press, 1988);
David Bell and Gill Valentine, Consuming Geographies (Routledge, 1997);
Barbara G. Shortridge and James R. Shortridge (eds) The Taste of American Place. A Reader on Regional and Ethnic Foods (Rowman and Littlefield, 1998);
Peter Atkins and Ian Bowler, Food in Society: Economy, Culture, Geography (Arnold, 2001);
Carole M. Counihan (ed.) Food in the United States: A Reader (Routledge, 2002);
Alan Davidson, The Penguin Companion to Food (Penguin, rev. ed. 2002);
Reay Tannahill, Food in History (Review, new updated ed. 2002);
Pauliina Raento, “The Changing Food Culture and Identity in Finland,” Journal of Finnish Studies 10 (Special Issue, 2006).