Animation as Education: Michael Pollan's 'Food Rules'

For the last decade food has become an increasingly talked about political issue, from community meetings to the floor of Congress.  However many of the complexities of our food and our current food system are difficult to digest. Thankfully we have authors like Michael Pollan to simplify issues into bite size pieces.  But now, for those of us who are visual learners, Marija Jacimovic and Benoit Detalle have produced a charming stop-motion film that uses vegetables to visualize Pollan’s “Food Rules” talk (presented at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts (RSA) in 2010). The animation helps to distill and unpack some of Pollan’s key points in an easily comprehendible and engaging 2-minute video. 

Michael Pollan's Food Rules from Marija Jacimovic on Vimeo.

Michael Pollan himself recently went a step further in decoding some of the tricks behind supermarket layouts and how stores are designed to make you buy more in general, but also to buy more high revenue generating and high processed foods.


The food journalist collaborated with Nourish to create 'Supermarket Secrets', a guide to making healthy choices at the supermarket. In the short video, Pollan helps the average shopper navigate the grocery store to find fresh, whole foods and to understand why items are placed where they are.




 For more Nourish videos, click here.

FAO Launches SOLAW Report: Advisements on Agricultural Land and Water

Widespread degradation and deepening scarcity of land and water resources have placed a number of key food production systems around the globe at risk, posing a profound challenge to the task of feeding a world population expected to reach 9 billion people by 2050, according to the new FAO report on the State of the World's Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture (SOLAW) published in January 2012.

The report noted that although there was a three-fold increase in food production in the last 50 years, most areas achieving these results relied on “management practices that have degraded the land and water systems upon which food production depends.”  A number of these systems/ areas now face the risk of a “progressive breakdown of their productive capacity under a combination of excessive demographic pressure and unsustainable agriculture use and practices”. Combined with the complications brought on by climate change, these systems at risk may simply not be able to contribute as expected in meeting human demands by 2050.

This risk is now affecting all regions around the globe and, as natural resource bottlenecks are increasingly felt, competition for land and water will become “pervasive” – not only between urban and industrial users, but within the agricultural sector as well– between livestock, staple crops, non-food crop, and biofuel production.  The challenge of providing sufficient food for an ever-more hungry planet, especially in developing countries, where quality land, soil nutrients and water are least abundant has never been more difficult.

“Worldwide, the poorest have the least access to land and water and are locked in a poverty trap of small farms with poor quality soils and high vulnerability to land degradation and climactic uncertainty,” it notes.

Over 40 percent of the world’s degraded lands are found in areas with high poverty rates. However, degradation is a risk across all income groups, 30% of the world’s degraded lands are in areas with moderate levels of poverty while 20% are in areas with low poverty rates.

The report centers on concern for the increasing imbalance between availability and demand for land and water resources at the local and national levels. The number of areas reaching the limits of their production capacity is fast increasing, the report warns. SOLAW also provides for the first time ever a global assessment of the state of the planet’s land resources: 25 percent of the earth’s lands are highly degraded and another 8 percent are moderately degraded, and only10 percent are ranked as “improving.”  Further more, water scarcity is growing and salinization and pollution of groundwater and degradation of water bodies and water-related ecosystems are rising. “Because of the dependence of many key food production systems on groundwater, declining aquifer levels and continued abstraction of non-renewable groundwater present a growing risk to local and global food production,” SOLAW warns.

The report makes the following recommendations:

·         · Improving the efficiency of water use by agriculture. Most irrigation systems across the world perform below their capacity. A combination of improved irrigation scheme management, investment in local knowledge and modern technology, knowledge development and training can increase water-use efficiency

·         · Encourage innovative farming practices such as conservation agriculture, agro-forestry, integrated crop-livestock systems and integrated irrigation-aquaculture systems which hold the promise of expanding production efficiently to address food security and poverty while limiting impacts on ecosystems

·          · Increasing investment in agricultural development. Gross investment requirements between 2007 and 2050 for irrigation water management in developing countries are estimated at almost $1 trillion. Land protection and development, soil conservation and flood control will require around $160 billion worth of investment in the same period

·         · Greater support for ensuring that national policies and institutions are modernized, collaborate together and are better equipped to cope with today’s emerging challenges of water and land resource management.

Throughout the SOLAW report there are multiple examples of successful actions undertaken across the globe that illustrate a multiplicity of available options that are potentially replicable elsewhere. Inevitably stakeholders will need to evaluate trade-offs among a variety of environmental goods and services, but the highly differentiated options highlighted provide a good start for matching options with local experience and knowledge. 

You can read the executive summary here