Let's Eat : Sustainable Food for a Hungry Planet

Kimberley Veness

Description

All the food you eat, whether it's an apple or a steak or a chocolate-coated cricket, has a story.

Let's Eat uncovers the secret lives of our groceries, exploring alternative—and sometimes bizarre—farm technology and touring gardens up high on corporate rooftops and down low in military-style bunkers beneath city streets. Packed with interesting and sometimes startling facts on agriculture around the world, Let's Eat reveals everything from the size of the biggest farm in the world to how many pesticides are in a single grape to which insect people prefer to eat.

Sujets

• Food Security
• Juvenile Nonfiction
• Sustainability
• World citizen
• Grocery store
• Local food
• Eating
• Organic
• Farm
• Environment
• Fishing
• Technology
• Hydroponics
• Gardening
• Food
• Diversity
• Ecology
• Permaculture
• Locavore
• Agriculture
• Eat
• Feed
• Farmer
• Monoculture
• Innovation
• Hameçonnage
• Conservation
• Nature

Informations

• Publié par: Orca Book Publishers
• Date de parution: 07 février 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781459809413
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Text copyright © 2017 Kimberley Veness
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Veness, Kimberley, 1989-, author Let's eat : sustainable food for a hungry planet / Kimberley Veness. (Orca footprints)
Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4598-0939-0 (hardcover).— ISBN 978-1-4598-0940-6 (pdf).— ISBN 978-1-4598-0941-3 (epub)
1. Sustainable agriculture—Juvenile literature. 2. Food supply— Juvenile literature. I. Title. II. Series: Orca footprints
s494.5.s86v46 2017 j630 c2016-904462-9 c2016-904463-7
First published in the United States, 2017 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016949028
Summary: Part of the nonfiction Footprints series for middle readers. Illustrated with many color photographs, this book explores where the food we eat comes from and what the future of farming looks like.
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Cover images by Getty Images, Shari Nakagawa Back cover images (top left to right): Fallen Fruit (David Burns and Austin Young), Kiva, Helder Ramos; (bottom left to right): William Neumann Photography, Katie Stagliano,William Neumann Photography
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS www.orcabook.com

A boy selling watermelon at a market in the capital city of Managua, Nicaragua. SJORS737/ DREAMSTIME.COM
For my children, Landon and Sawyer
Contents Introduction CHAPTER ONE: Let's Eat A Veggie Marathon In Excess We Trust Full Circle Our Daily Meat Cheap Now, Costly Later Aquaculture: A Fish for Everyone What's Your Food Really Saying? CHAPTER TWO: Small Is Beautiful On the Homestead Work It New Roots Permaculture The “No-till” Zone Rice-Duck Farming Organic or Bust Pasteurized vs. Raw From Farm to Market CHAPTER THREE: Urban Foodscapes Do You Live in a Food Desert? Gardening Together Food Forests Commercial Urban Farms Urban Homesteading Food Truck Fever CHAPTER FOUR: A Farm for the Future Dinner’s in the Fish Tank Insects…Yum! Green Eggs and Jellyfish Lab Burger, Anyone? Milk: Beyond the Cereal Bowl Revolutionary Rice? Bee Biz Farming in Space! Bringing It Back to the Table Resources Acknowledgments Glossary Index Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Beginning
Page List 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48
Introduction

My son Landon and I picking apples at an orchard in Kelowna, British Columbia. One of his first foods was applesauce I made with apples from this orchard. Now he will happily devour a whole apple in one sitting, core and all! LAURA CARBONNEAU
D o you ever wonder what your groceries would tell you if they could talk? When I realized that the bananas, avocados and mandarin oranges I loved had traveled across more countries than I ever had, I decided to pay closer attention to where my food came from. I discovered that everything you buy, whether it’s an apple or a pair of shoes, has a story. I found out my salmon fillet came from a fish that had never swum in the ocean, my orange juice was previously brown, and some ingredients in my favorite packaged foods had originated from plants conceived under a microscope! This book unlocks the mysterious secret lives of our groceries, explores alternative—and sometimes bizarre—farm technology, and tours gardens up high on corporate rooftops to down low in military-style bunkers beneath city streets.

Few children in North America are growing up to become farmers like their parents and grandparents before them. SUSAN H. SMITH/ ISTOCK.COM

From Farm to Table

This is me herding our three goats and cow, led by the rope, up to the barn. KIMBERLEY VENESS
When I was a child, my family lived on a farm in Saskatchewan. I loved planting, watering and harvesting veggies, helping my mom make jams and pies from Saskatoon berries, collecting chicken eggs and drinking milk fresh from our cow, Daisy, and goat, Pixie. Now that I’m a mom, I try to find the healthiest foods for my family and make as much as I can from scratch with whatever’s in the fridge or pantry.
CHAPTER ONE
Let's Eat

Seasonal produce is available year-round at most grocery stores. TOLGAILDUN/ DREAMSTIME.COM
W h en you push the cart around the grocery store with your mom or dad, do you ever stop and think about where all the food comes from? The answer may surprise you.
A VEGGIE MARATHON
If you’re shopping in North America, your groceries may travel between 2,400 and 4,000 kilometers (1,500 and 2,500 miles) before you actually eat them. Getting food from another country seems like an outlandish idea when you could find fresh options closer to home, but products grown in other countries are often cheaper because of lower labor costs and fewer environmental regulations . Farm workers are often underpaid and forced to live and work in poor conditions. Buying local reduces transport time and supports the local economy, but farmers in cooler climates can’t grow heat-loving crops like strawberries year-round. So what do you do? Do you add a box of imported strawberries to your cart or wait for local strawberries to come back in season?

Locals peruse the produce at this market in Ahmedabad, India. MANANSHAH1008/ WIKIPEDIA.ORG
IN EXCESS WE TRUST

Workers picked these beans in the morning, and customers will pick them up in the afternoon. SOL KAUFFMAN
Imagine you’re walking down a gravel road in the Canadian prairies. Canola (a crop that is processed into canola oil and used worldwide in cooking) grows on both sides of the road, covering the land in a bright yellow blanket as far as the eye can see. It’s beautiful, but it comes at a price. Agriculture has come a long way from the postcard picture of a cozy farmhouse, a red barn and fields planted with a variety of crops. Few of our foods originate from farms like these. Most of the berries, fruit, veggies and grains we eat come from monocultures —single crops grown on large areas of land. Growing just one crop makes harvest and pest management much easier for farmers who grow on a large scale.

FARMING FACT: Did you know that digging your hands into a garden bed has been scientifically proven to increase happiness? Gardeners touch and breathe in a soil bacterium called Mycobacterium vaccae , which stimulates the feel-good sensors in the brain.
Before the Industrial Revolution , when machines started to replace human labor, farmers relied on planting and harvesting with the aid of horses or oxen, and sometimes help from family members and neighbors. School even let out earlier in the afternoon around harvest time so children could lend a hand. Prior to 1834, when the first reaper (a machine for cutting down grain)hit the market, grain crops were harvested by hand with a sickle (a handheld tool with a curved blade), and it could take weeks for one farmer to harvest his field of grain, even with extra help. Now, almost two hundred years later, it takes only hours. The first combine (grain-harvesting machine) was created in 1835 and came into use in the United States around 1900, and its successors can seed fields, add fertilizer and pesticides, and harvest crops with unparalleled efficiency. But does speed and efficiency produce the best possible food, and how has speeding up food production changed what we know about what we eat?
FULL CIRCLE

Farmers harvesting by hand. LC-DIG-MATPC-14346/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
When I was a child, I used to think the thirty-minute drive that separated my town from the nearest city meant the two places were completely unconnected.