Storylines

The backstory of our food is certainly no fairy tale. It involves hundreds of millions of small farmers, particularly in the Global South, working in harsh and uncertain conditions to provide for their livelihoods while producing the majority of the world’s food^[1]. At the same time, a minority of large industrial farms in the Global North expand their acreage and profit margins^[2]. It involves large corporations and financial institutions increasing their power and ownership over the human food chain^[3], while a multitude of “alternative food networks” spring up to try something different, something smaller and more caring of the planet we call home. It involves diverse cultures with their value systems intertwined with diverse natures and their eco-systems that all come together, for better or worse, to coordinate activities across this vast thing we call the “food system”. And it also involves a heck of a lot of living, breathing flesh! The combined mass of livestock in the food system now represents over 97% of all mammal biomass on the entire planet^[4]!  

Unsurprisingly, the crops required to feed this giant livestock herd displace and compete with land required to feed people directly, or provide biomass to various industries (e.g. biofuels or timber/paper), or fulfil many other purposes and functions (e.g. space for living, recycling our waste, supporting recreation, artistic inspiration, spiritual connection or aesthetic beauty). The end result is a food system that incessantly muscles its way into land and waters that are already working hard to safeguard the planet’s shared cultural and biological wealth and diversity^[5]. The losers in all of this are the marginalized people whose voices are supressed by the shouts of the winners, future generations of all of us who will live in an impoverished world, and the millions of other species that also call this planet home. 

So which of the multitude of storylines do we focus on in the Deliberative Diets project? Continue reading about the selected perspectives from Spain, Ecuador and Switzerland.