To make people aware of and help address the problem of food waste, a french supermarket started selling “Inglorious fruit and vegetables”, the not so perfect ones, at a discounted price. You can read about this here.
“Planting for Change” is a film I came across while doing the MOOC Global Food Security – Addressing the Challenge, from the University of Lancaster on Future Learn.
It shows how communities in China making use of old and traditional knowledge – the one we are losing or have completely lost on the so called developed countries – are addressing the challenge of keeping on getting food despite climate changes.
With a traditional approach, with no need to use pesticides, they obtain organic food with good yields and as it seems with a fair income.
So, don’t miss it! You can watch it on the International Institute for Environment Development’s website.
Games are a powerful tool when it comes to motivate people to change their behaviours. So 
a game about sustainability can be a very useful tool to make people start living more sustainably!
2020 Energy is a serious game about energy and sustainable development aimed to create awareness on teenagers about these issues. It is available in several languages and it can be played here.
I would like to think that technology is giving everyone the opportunity to easily access learning, but unfortunately I believe that’s not true.
For instance, it seems that a big percentage of MOOC participants have already a degree …
As observed on Louise Tickle’s article Are Moocs the best chance we have to satisfy a global thirst for education? (theguardian.com, Monday 20 January 2014 10.15 GMT): Though they may be popular to start off with, Moocs have dire completion rates, observes Brabon. For his vampire fiction course, that meant 1,000 enrolments and 31 completions. “And almost all of those had a first degree or had been educated to degree level” he says. “So the Moocs trend may not be opening up HE to sectors of the population it hasn’t reached to date.”
Therefore questions arise:
More questions can be asked, but just by answering these I think we can conclude technology is “simply providing more learning to those with access already”.
If being a foodie is to have great interest in food, its flavours, textures, new ways of cooking and to want to try it prepared with different approaches and philosophies, then I’m a foodie. And being a foodie is to come across many different things, for instance sustainability … For instance, many famous chefs are becoming more and more concerned in developing and creating dishes with fresh seasonal ingredients they can grow on “their backyards” I suppose because, among other considerations, they’re aware of the concept of food miles and how it impacts sustainability.
Here, the site where I came across the concept of food miles for the first time some years ago; also with very interesting testimonies and articles on others matters related with food)
And now, I came across an article by Christine Soares on the Scientific American site (read article here) that presents what it seems to be a very interesting book about food and sustainability – Cool Cuisine: Taking the bite out of global warming, Laura Stec.
From what I understood we can learn how to cook in a sustainable way that will please (specially) a foodie, because, as it’s said on the article and on the book, Such [industrial] food has “no vibe”. This book is already in my shopping list and as Christine Soares says “Let’s save Earth one stir-fry at a time”.
Final note: Umai, an oriental restaurant in Lisbon that serves excellent sushi and sashimi, is acting sustainably and no longer serves tuna.
This video is a powerful presentation (good resources, very well used) by Johan Rockstrom about what we are doing to planet Earth and what we still can do to avoid the disaster!
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/johan_rockstrom_let_the_environment_guide_our_development.html
The “quadruple squeeze” is a powerful image to make people aware about what’s happening to our planet.
The boundaries approach is also an interesting one: looking for what we can still avoid to damage irreparable and put a “fence” to prevent further damaging, seems a logical approach everyone can understand.
But is the shift in mindsets happening? Will it happen timely? Will it ever happen?
Already showed and denounced in 2000 by Agnès Varda on her documentary Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I) the outrageous food waste generated on supermarkets still continues: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24603008
For the sake of sustainability, but also for the sake of those in need, let’s hope that all the supermarkets start acting as mentioned on the end of the mentioned article (link above) to prevent food waste.
When needed, procedures and legislation (for instance those related to food safety) should be adjusted, so these actions can be viable and real!
TIWIT 