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Category: Policy

Published December 4, 2012

Sounds About Right (Food Policy Content)

There is nothing more basic than food. Food is the biggest of the essentials of life, our biggest industry, our most frequently indulged pleasure, and perhaps the greatest cause of disease and death. Despite its importance, food is often taken for granted, especially by academics, who have long considered food matters to be too coarse for scholarly attention.

From Warren Belasco’s introduction to his book Food: The Key Concepts, which I will be using as one of the core readings in the food policy course I am teaching next semester. The emphasis is mine.

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Published November 30, 2012

China’s Great Famine

Courtesy of one of the students in my development seminar, here are links to a two-part NPR story about China’s famine of 1958-1962: part 1 and part 2.

Between 1958 and 1962, an estimated 20 to 43 people died of hunger in China, which China’s official statistics claiming 15 million deaths and the highest estimates reporting a death toll of 45 million. For comparison, the death toll from World War 1 is estimated to be about 17 million. During the Chinese famine, people eventually survived on anything they could find, eventually going so far as to eat their dead and their own children.

The NPR story discusses Tombstone, a book which just came out in English and which took Chinese reporter Yang Jisheng 10 years of working in secrecy to write. I’m about 100 pages into the book. It is a fascinating and monumental account of China’s Great Famine. And as one might reasonably expect, it is banned in China.

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Published November 7, 2012

In Which I Talk About Food Prices

While I was in Montreal for the McGill Conference on Global Food Security a few weeks ago, I was interviewed by CKUT — McGill’s student-run radio — for their Health on Earth program.

I spoke with CKUT’s Lorraine Wong about the difference between rising food prices and food price volatility and the social consequences thereof, and about various other food-policy-related topics. Though Lorraine aired the interview unedited, I managed to sound semi-coherent.

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