Reports and websites on food insecurity in the United States
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Hungry and Homeless in CollegeA 2017 report on the status of college students' access to basic human needs, like stable food and housing.
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Still Hungry and Homeless in CollegeThe 2018 update to Hungry and Homeless in College (see above).
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USDA on food security in the U.S.A source for tables, graphs, and other statistical information related to food security and insecurity.
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Food research action centerFind reports and fact sheets on topics in food insecurity, public health, and more.
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Center for Hunger-Free CommunitiesDrexel University's research center combines scientific and social science research with the goal of ending hunger. Much of the research is done in Philadelphia.
Global food security and supply
Websites
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Food and Agriculture Organization of the United NationsResearch reports and links to more in-depth information on the work of this important global organization.
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Infographics on global food, agriculture, hunger, and nutritionIf you're looking for quick information or a eye-catching graphic for your presentation, browse these publicly available and reliable infographics from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Books
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The Wizard and the Prophet by From the best-selling, award-winning author of 1491 and 1493--an incisive portrait of the two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment, laying the groundwork for how people in the twenty-first century will choose to live in tomorrow's world. In forty years, Earth's population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups--Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug's cry. Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces--food, water, energy, climate change--grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author's insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth.
Call Number: GE56 .V64 M36 2018ISBN: 9780307961693Publication Date: 2018-01-23 -
The end of plenty : the race to feed a crowded world by When the demographer Robert Malthus (1766-1834) famously outlined the brutal relationship between food and population, he never imagined the success of modern scientific agriculture. In the mid-twentieth century, an unprecedented agricultural advancement known as the Green Revolution brought hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, and improved irrigation that drove the greatest population boom in history--but left ecological devastation in its wake. In The End of Plenty, award-winning environmental journalist Joel K. Bourne Jr. puts our race to feed the world in dramatic perspective. With a skyrocketing world population and tightening global grain supplies spurring riots and revolutions, humanity must produce as much food in the next four decades as it has since the beginning of civilization to avoid a Malthusian catastrophe. Yet climate change could render half our farmland useless by century's end. Writing with an agronomist's eye for practical solutions and a journalist's keen sense of character, detail, and the natural world, Bourne takes readers from his family farm to international agricultural hotspots to introduce the new generation of farmers and scientists engaged in the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. He discovers young, corporate cowboys trying to revive Ukraine as Europe's breadbasket, a Canadian aquaculturist channeling ancient Chinese traditions, the visionary behind the world's largest organic sugar-cane plantation, and many other extraordinary individuals struggling to increase food supplies--quickly and sustainably--as droughts, floods, and heat waves hammer crops around the globe. Part history, part reportage and advocacy, The End of Plenty is a panoramic account of the future of food, and a clarion call for anyone concerned about our planet and its people.
Call Number: HD9000.5 .B58 2015ISBN: 9780393079531Publication Date: 2015-06-15 -
Who really feeds the world? : the failures of agribusiness and the promise of agroecology by Debunking the notion that our current food crisis must be addressed through industrial agriculture and genetic modification, author and activist Vandana Shiva argues that those forces are in fact the ones responsible for the hunger problem in the first place. Who Really Feeds the World? is a powerful manifesto calling for agricultural justice and genuine sustainability, drawing upon Shiva's thirty years of research and accomplishments in the field. Instead of relying on genetic modification and large-scale monocropping to solve the world's food crisis, she proposes that we look to agroecology--the knowledge of the interconnectedness that creates food--as a truly life-giving alternative to the industrial paradigm. Shiva succinctly and eloquently lays out the networks of people and processes that feed the world, exploring issues of diversity, the needs of small famers, the importance of seed saving, the movement toward localization, and the role of women in producing the world's food.
Call Number: HD9000.5 .S455 2016ISBN: 9781623170622Publication Date: 2016-06-28 -
The political history of American food aid : an uneasy benevolence (E-book) by
Call Number: HV696 .F6 R55 2017 EBISBN: 9780190228903Publication Date: 2017 -
The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food by In this updated edition of The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food Wayne Roberts puts under the microscope a global food system that is under strain from climate change and from economic disaster. He shows how a world food system based on supermarkets and agribusiness corporations is unsustainable and looks at new models of producing healthy food from all over the world.
Call Number: HD9000.5 .R62 2013ISBN: 9781780261317Publication Date: 2013-10-15 -
The Reproach of Hunger by In a groundbreaking book, based on six years of on the ground reporting, expert David Rieff offers a masterly review about whether ending extreme poverty and widespread hunger is within our reach as increasingly promised. Can we provide enough food for 9 billion (2 billion more than today) in 2050, especially the bottom poorest in the Global South? Some of the most brilliant scientists, world politicians, and aid and development persons forecast an end to the crisis of massive malnutrition in the next decades. However, food rights campaigners (many associated with green parties in both the rich and poor world) and traditional farming advocates reject the intervention of technology, biotech solutions, and agribusiness. Many economists predict that with the right policies, poverty in Africa can end in twenty years. "Philanthrocapitalists" Bill Gates and Warren Buffett spend billions on technology to "solve" the problem, relying on technology. Rieff, who has been studying and reporting on humanitarian aid and development for thirty years, puts the claims of both sides under a microscope and asks if any one of these efforts will solve the crisis. He cites climate change, unstable governments that receive aid, the cozy relationship between the philanthropic sector and agricultural giants like Monsanto and Syngenta, that are often glossed over. The Reproach of Hunger is the only book to look at this debate refusing to take the cherished claims of either side at face value. Rieff answers a careful "yes" to this crucial challenge to humanity's future. The answer to the central question is yes, if we don't confuse our hopes with realities and good intensions with capacities.
Call Number: HD9000.5 .R53 2015ISBN: 9781439123874Publication Date: 2015-10-06 -
The Politics of the Pantry by "What's for dinner?" has always been a complicated question. The locavore movement has politicized food and challenged us to rethink the answer in new and radical ways. These days, questions about where our food comes from have moved beyond 100-mile-dieters into the mainstream. Celebrity chefs Jamie Oliver and Alice Waters, alternative food gurus such as Michael Pollan, and numerous other popular and academic commentators have all talked about the importance of understanding the sources and transformation of food on a human scale. In The Politics of the Pantry, Michael Mikulak interrogates these narratives - what he calls "storied food" - in food culture. As with any story, however, it is important to ask: who is telling it? Who is the audience? What assumptions are being made? Mikulak examines competing narratives of food, pleasure, sustainability, and value that have emerged from the growing sustainable food movement as well as food's past and present relationship to environmentalism in order to understand the potential and the limits of food politics. He also considers whether or not sustainable food practices can address questions about health, environmental sustainability, and local economic development, while at the same time articulating an ethical globalization. An innovative blend of academic analysis, poetic celebration, and autobiography, The Politics of the Pantry provides anyone interested in the future of food and the emergence of a green economy with a better understanding of how what we eat is transforming the world.
Call Number: GT2850 .M54 2013ISBN: 9780773542761Publication Date: 2013-08-26