The Geography of Food
the importance of mapping one’s alimentation
Food, through its production to consumption, gives us multiple opportunities to contemplate on space. By this I refer to the geography of food; that is, where food is grown, processed, or even reared; how it gets to us; and finally, the spaces within which we eat our food.
There is also the issue of the spatial configuration of food itself. For example, understanding the molecular structure of food and why differences between organic and genetically modified crops might matter.
Whether it is at a micro- or macro-level, it cannot be denied that our daily sustenance has an interesting geography that we often take for granted.
Many of us urban dwellers are now used to eating foodstuff that is not grown in our cities, or even for that matter in our countries. The luxury of food choice means that we expect to be able to acquire groceries that are out of season or foreign to our locale, without much thought about how they are produced and transported to us.
As we eat our favorite bar of chocolate, for example, little do we think of the cocoa farm abroad that might employ child labor, in order to yield bountiful harvests for a voracious global economy.
We certainly do not consider whether the international demand for chocolate leads to the…
