Geography of food

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The Geography of Food is a field of human geography that is concerned with the production, consumption and supply chains of food.

Contents

[edit] History

Spatial variations in food production and consumption practices have been noted for thousands of years. In fact, Plato commented on the destructive nature of agriculture when he referred to the soil erosion from the mountainsides surrounding Athens (3) (p.61). The study of food has not been confined to a single discipline, and has received attention from a huge range of diverse sources.

Modern geographers initially focused on food as an economic activity, especially in terms of agricultural geography. It was not until recently that geographers have turned their attention to food in a wider sense: "The emergence of an agro-food geography that seeks to examine issues along the food chain or within systems of food provision derives, in part, from the strengthening of political economy approaches in the 1980s" (Winter 2004).

[edit] Overlapping areas of study

Because food is a bridge between the natural and the social world, it has received attention from both the physical sciences and the social sciences. Some of the earliest numerical data about food production come from bureaucratic sources linked to the ancient civilizations of Ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire (3). Traders have also been influential in documenting food networks. Early Indian mapped the location of trading posts associated with food production nodes.

Thomas Malthus famously stated that food output could only expand arithmetically (in proportion with the extension of farmland) while population could increase geometrically, leading to a 'population bomb' or a Malthusian catastrophe. His theory was also given a spatial element when he predicted the Irish famine.

Since the industrial revolution though, the study of food has been increasingly formalized, often taking an explicit spatial dimension. Food featured greatly in economics, experimental agriculture, political economy and travel literature. It was still not studied from an explicitly geographical perspective though until the 20th century.

[edit] Food Production

Food production was the first element of food to receive extensive attention from geographers.

[edit] Food Consumption

The huge variation in diet and consumption practices on global and regional scales became the focus of geographers and economists with the vastly expanding population and widely publicized famines of the 1960s. Differences in the caloric intake of food and the composition of diet was estimated and mapped for many countries from the 1960s onward

[edit] Power Networks

Power networks in food is a relatively new field in the study of food. It was kick-started by Richard Le Heron with his book globalized agriculture (Pergamon, 1993). Since then, a large and rapidly growing literature of the geographies emerged in some of the human geography journals

[edit] Policy for agriculture

[edit] The Future

[edit] References

(1)Atkins, P. and Bowler, I. 2001 Food in Society: Economy, Culture, Geography ISBN 978-0340720042 (2)Tude, C. 2005 So Shall We Reap: What's gone wrong with the world's food and how to fix it ISBN 978-0141009506 (3)Evans, L.T. 1998 Feeding the Ten Billion: Plants and Population growth ISBN 978-0521646857