Global Food Term Paper
Isadora Williams
As consumers, we tend to not put too much thought into where our food comes from or
the effects it has on the world around us. We tend to romanticize the origins of our food for
example our chicken tenders coming from healthy, free-roaming chickens from the local farm
and the cocoa in our chocolate coming from happy farmers living in the sunny, tropical countries
of central and south america. We tend to get these ideas from the packaging and advertisements
put out by large-scale food corporations such as Hershey’s and Purdue, however the ideal
conditions that they promote in the media are far from truth. The effects from their true farming
practices have been found to be detrimental both economically and environmentally to people in
both the global north and south.
For many large-scale food corporations in the global north, the goal of making profits far
outweigh the goal of sustainability in today’s food system. But first, what is a sustainable food
system? The Kindling Trust, an organic and local farming advocate group located in the United
Kingdom, defines a sustainable system of one that “takes into account environmental, health,
social and economic concerns and consists of eight inter-related principles. These principles
include buying foods that are local & seasonal, farming organically, reducing foods of animal
origin & maximizing welfare standards, excluding fish species identified at risk, including fair-
trade-certified products, promoting health and well being, food democracy and reduction of
waste and packaging.” Today’s system is far from sustainable. According to Millstone and Lang
of “The Atlas of Food”, over 30% of green house gas emissions (which contribute to global
warming) are contributed to by today’s agriculture and are predicted to continue to rise of no
serious changes are implemented soon. In my personal opinion, if more people chose to eat less
meat, purchased more fair-trade certified food products, and used their voices to become
advocates in food policy, then more progress could be made in our current food system.
A perfect example of an area of today’s food system that is in desperate need of reform is
the lobster industry. Contrary to popular belief, most of the lobster we eat in the United States is
not caught by local fisherman in Maine. As America’s demand for lobster is higher than that of
which could be supplied by such a fisher, most of it is caught in central america. Divers in places
like Nicaragua are most likely the ones responsible for harvesting the lobster you eat at places
such as Red Lobster (Timmerman, 2013). Because there is such a high demand for lobster in the
United States, most of the lobster in shallow waters have been picked off forcing divers to resort
to deep diving to harvest their lobster. The problem is that many of them aren’t educated in the
safety procedures of deep diving and aren’t equipped with with the proper gear (i.e. pressure
