Hello!
I hope you all are enjoying these last few days of fall, binge eat everything pumpkin spice and apple cider and all other marketing schemes. Enjoy these flavours all year round, they are not limited to a season!
The main article from CBC featured a university student from Dalhousie University who ate only what she found for free on campus for a week. She explains her experiences as hard to know when she would eat next, and that she was extremely unproductive in her academics and felt tired, hungry, and unfocused. She ended up packing small snacks at home in cases of extreme hunger. She stated that it made her much more aware of food security issues in the world today.
The article from BBC is about how Prince Charles is urging British people to buy British food. Farmers and the agricultural sector in Britain is facing challenges, but that people can really help this situation by buying stuff made within the country. He says that buying food produced in Britain ensures that it will be fresh and high-quality, and bridge gaps between rural and urban communities in the UK. It will help to guarantee a strong future for agriculture.
Both of the news stories deal with food insecurities, one with personal hunger and one with the economic stability of agriculture in a country. In a world that is increasingly connected to one another, the social media posts for the day certainly did the opposite of food insecurity, people were boasting about their opulent food choices. This demonstrates to the viewers that whomever suffers from food insecurity (which is most of us on this planet if you truly consider it), they are the ‘other’ and social media personalities are rich and unaffected by global markets.
The tumblr post for today featured an inspiration quote about getting through tough times. This was tagged for diet, meaning that is meant to inspire tough times for diets, yet the people who suffer the most from ‘storms’ are the people who suffer from food insecurity. However, somehow with strength, people can raise above this. This is a very unrealistic picture to paint for people; policies and better food systems make it so people can raise above it.
The top Instagram post is about girls treating themselves to fancy vegan smoothies. This signals to the viewer that they can afford treats, someone in which most of the worlds population cannot do. Why is it that we increasingly share everything and “humble-brag” everything in which we do? The girls who are sharing this post are likely not wealthy or should be spending their money on smoothies, it would be better spent on whole fruit. Yet, this is a carefully crafted post to demonstrate their wealth and social status through food. Food signals to other your status in life (and status on social media), thus having overpriced smoothies is a good place to start.
If most of the world is food insecure, why are we not reflecting this on social media? We are so quick to show the good parts of our life on social media, but never show the bad. Maybe we shared all of the good, the bad, and the ugly about our world of food, we would come up with more solutions for our food issues and share the knowledge.
Till tomorrow!
Works Cited
CBC News. “Food security one-week challenge ‘went’ pretty badly for Dal student,” CBC News, Nov. 9, 2015. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/free-food-diet-dal-student-1.3311586