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Carregando... Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations (edição: 2010)de Evan Fraser
Informações da ObraEmpires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations de Evan D.G. Fraser
  
Simon & Schuster (88) Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.   jhawn | Jul 31, 2017 |  Sadly, their scholarship doesn’t match their writing. The British Empire didn’t fail because of a shortage of grains. Some of the dates given are just wrong; in at least one case, that makes what they are saying impossible (that a certain event caused something). The book jumps around in time and place; I found it rather jolting at times to make the connections. For some reason, they felt they could bind a lot of the events together with the story of the world roaming trader Carletti, but they don’t even give him a continuous narration. He really had nothing to do with their thesis. What was good about it? It does examine food surplus and scarcity. To be a food empire, the empire must be able to produce or capture a surplus of grains. They must be able to ship it to all its area, and trade it for other things, both necessities and luxuries. Having more food than your own population also gives a society another, very important, thing: when there is enough food that not everyone has to be a farmer, people can do other things, like learn to read and write, become artisans, and go exploring. Being able to have a non-farmer class gave us civilization. They also go over why the food surpluses ceased to be. Irrigation that created over saline soils, loss of soil nutrients, loss of soil itself due to erosion, lowering of average temperatures by even one degree makes plants take longer to ripen grain, lack of rain- all these things can create disaster. And we are facing that again today: today we face climate change, soil erosion, drought, and the fact that the vast majority of grain growing (and, hence, meat producing) relies on petroleum inputs- and we are fast running out of petroleum. The authors do not have an answer to our possible/probably plight. One thing they do suggest isn’t something that will work for most areas of the world: becoming locavores. Eating only foods grown within a circumscribed area at least remedies the amounts of fuel used to truck and process foods. Now, a big city, with all its suburbs, covers a huge area with blacktop and concrete and will have few areas for growing foods- and it takes a LOT of area to grow grains and frankly no one wants a pig farm next door. Our area, despite being rural, cannot successfully feed itself. The soils are not rich enough to support much beyond grass hay and cattle. The growing season is too short to ripen grain a lot of years- not to mention many fruits and vegetables. It’s possible on a small scale to ripen peppers and tomatoes by protective coverings but it would take a LOT of greenhouses to feed the county year round. What this book does is point out a lot of different aspects of food supplies and make you think about them. For that I give it four stars. (  ) lauriebrown54 | Mar 25, 2015 | Fraser and Rimas try to pepper the narrative with tales of Francesco Carletti, a 16/17th Century entrepreneur who traveled the world to make and lose a fortune on the food trade. I found the story interesting but largely irrelevant to most of the rest of the book, more like it was just used as a lead-in to chapters to keep a narrative flow instead of enhancing it. The structuring of the book isn't chronological or geographical so the book kind of lacks a stable back bone. Finally, I found the last part of the book (and the conclusion) to be a let-down. The authors talk about the current food empire and how we're doomed to fail, mention things like organics and Slow Food, say that they're basically fashion statements, but maybe could do something to help. I feel like they make bad conclusions with decent data, and I'm not really sure why their conclusions fall so flat, but they do. If you're interested in food history, there are a lot of interesting books out there to read, including An Edible History of Humanity (although I wasn't a huge fan of that book either). For food justice and sustainability read Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis. (  ) lemontwist | Dec 19, 2010 | sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
PrêmiosDistinctions
We are what we eat: this aphorism contains a profound truth about civilization, one that has played out on the world historical stage over many millennia of human endeavor. Using the colorful diaries of a sixteenth-century merchant as a narrative guide, Empires of Food vividly chronicles the fate of people and societies for the past twelve thousand years through the foods they grew, hunted, traded, and ate--and gives us fascinating, and devastating, insights into what to expect in years to come. In energetic prose, agricultural expert Evan D. G. Fraser and journalist Andrew Rimas tell gripping stories that capture the flavor of places as disparate as ancient Mesopotamia and imperial Britain, taking us from the first city in the once-thriving Fertile Crescent to today's overworked breadbaskets and rice bowls in the United States and China, showing just what food has meant to humanity. Cities, culture, art, government, and religion are founded on the creation and exchange of food surpluses, complex societies built by shipping corn and wheat and rice up rivers and into the stewpots of history's generations. But eventually, inevitably, the crops fail, the fields erode, or the temperature drops, and the center of power shifts. Cultures descend into dark ages of poverty, famine, and war. It happened at the end of the Roman Empire, when slave plantations overworked Europe's and Egypt's soil and drained its vigor. It happened to the Mayans, who abandoned their great cities during centuries of drought. It happened in the fourteenth century, when medieval societies crashed in famine and plague, and again in the nineteenth century, when catastrophic colonial schemes plunged half the world into a poverty from which it has never recovered. And today, even though we live in an age of astounding agricultural productivity and genetically modified crops, our food supplies are once again in peril. Empires of Food brilliantly recounts the history of cyclic consumption, but it is also the story of the future; of, for example, how a shrimp boat hauling up an empty net in the Mekong Delta could spark a riot in the Caribbean. It tells what happens when a culture or nation runs out of food--and shows us the face of the world turned hungry. The authors argue that neither local food movements nor free market economists will stave off the next crash, and they propose their own solutions. A fascinating, fresh history told through the prism of the dining table, Empires of Food offers a grand scope and a provocative analysis of the world today, indispensable in this time of global warming and food crises. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — Carregando...GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)641.309Technology Home and family management Food And Drink FoodClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (3.07)
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