“Bread is known to be convenient, nutritious, and, of course, delicious. From naan in India to the French baguette, we take a look at 29 types of bread around the world.” SOURCE: Insider Food
Of course geographers love videos that highlight places around that world that give you the feeling of leaving your homeland to travel to a different cultural context in new place. Videos like this that give a quick tour around the world so you can sample from the visual delights, even if the culinary ones are off the table. This Travel Insider video channel has a few great examples that show how distinct regional variations in food production create cultural distinct local customs. Food production is inherently cultural, and these videos show how local flavor creates a series of regional variations. Linked as well here is a great article showing the amazing diversity of breads around the world.
While I’m a fan of the “cheese around the world” video, I’ll include one other on the food theme–sandwiches from around the world–is embedded below.
“In the African Sahel, a country called Niger bordering the Sahara Desert, the largest desert in the world, is stopping desertification and turning is deserts into an Oasis. Regenerative Agriculture is leading the way with a technique called Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR). The innovative technique has been adopted by local farmers through peer-to-peer learning making it cost effective and easy to implement. Over the last 40 years the visual results and the data have shown FMNR has been extremely successful in turning desert into farmland. It has regenerated 5 million hectares of degraded land; 200 million trees have been restored and has benefited 2.5 million people increasing household income by 18-24%. The available arable land has doubled since the severe droughts of the 1970s and tree density has 10x since its all-time low in the 1980s. This is an extraordinary achievement considering Niger only receives on average 6.5 inches of rainfall a year and 80% of the country is considered a desert.” SOURCE: Leaf of Life on YouTube
This video highlights the effort that Niger has made to prevent the desertification. The Sahara could easily spread further south into the Sahel given the right (or wrong conditions). Overgrazing on marginal lands with little precipitation can easily lead to the expansion of the desert. Once of the strategies used by local communities in the Sahel is known as farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR).
This strategy of having farmers manage the land is seen as an effective way to promote sustainable environmental, economic, and developmental goals. In dry ecosystems on the edge of a desert like the Sahel in Niger, FMNR can reverse tree loss and biodiversity.
All 15 machines are probably too much too show in one sitting, but try one or two relevant to your students.
The individual machines that are shown in this video aren’t so important to our geographic inquiry, but the scale and the scope of mechanization on the agricultural sector is absolutely the point here. Agricultural production has increased exponentially (dare I say geometrically?) since the Industrial Revolution and machines (and increasingly sophisticated machinery) are the reason why. Our collective capacity to grow grow more food has many reverberating implications, and I’ll mention a few of them here:
Population growth has never faced the feared Malthusian limits.
The prices of most commodities (relative to the time in takes to earn the money) has dropped in the last few decades.
Less land is used for agriculture now than 20 years ago (Our World in Data).
One of the reasons for the importance of the uniform agricultural landscape (i.e.-evenly spaced rows) is that the mechanization process requires a degree of precision that only works with a highly uniform landscape. The vast majority of these machines rely of fossil fuels and not so easily replaced with commercial electric vehicles given their power requirements and need to be away from recharging stations.
The collapse of the Sri Lankan government was a shock, but outside of regional experts, few were paying attention to the South Asian Island nation during the global pandemic to worry about their agriculture and economy. Now is the time for us to reflect and consider. There was a currency crisis, food shortages, energy shortages, a suffering tourism industry during COVID, a popular uprising, but underneath it all were the policies that destabilized the whole system. Policies that sounded seductively enticing, and generated global admiration from the WEF and sustainable agriculture advocates. Sri Lanka received a glowing ESG score, but despite this international acclaim, it came with one fatal flaw—the policies didn’t support the people of Sri Lanka.
I will focus primarily on the agricultural aspects of crisis (since it fits best with human geography curriculum) but yes, there were other political and economic factors. Organic farming is only for the wealthy in developed countries that can afford organic food as a lifestyle choice, or the very poor in rural, underdeveloped regions that engage in subsistence agriculture without access to Green Revolution technologies. Organic food accounts for 1% of the global food trade, and most of humanity relies of the technological advancements made by the Green Revolution for their food supply.
Fertilizer is in short supply with the ban on synthetics.
The government of Sri Lanka announced a 10-year plan to transition to 100% organic farming, by banning synthetic fertilizers and pesticides (the very inputs that double Sri Lanka’s yield in the 1960s from the Green Revolution). Over 30% of Sri Lankan farmland lay dormant without enough manure and other approved replacements. Something else that we often forget is the modern agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuel usage for the heavy machinery to replace manual labor. As the economy struggled, fuel prices went up and resources were rationed so that farmers couldn’t run their machinery and couldn’t get they products to the market. 85% of farmers suffered crop losses and overall production declined by over 20%, which might not sound like much as the 4th largest tea exporter in the world and a country that primarily consumes rice, crashing the rice and tea markets in catastrophic.
Sustainable agriculture sounds lovely as a goal, but not if the needs of the people are not being met first. Sri Lanka serves a cautionary tale for countries prioritizing international environmental aims over policies that will promote economic growth and human flourishing within their borders. The romanticism of organic agriculture is a fine choice for those who can afford it, but horrible to impose on those who cannot.
“As winter approaches each year, a haze of toxic smog envelopes vast swaths of northern India, including the capital New Delhi, forcing authorities to shut schools and restrict the use of private vehicles. Unlike southern parts of the country, most arid regions of northern India, including New Delhi, struggle with dust, a common air pollutant. Environmental experts say New Delhi’s topography hobbles efforts by authorities to stave off the spike in pollution. In recent years, the problem has been exacerbated by the burning of crop residues in Punjab and Haryana states, part of the farm belt that borders New Delhi. Relatively prosperous farmers from Punjab and Haryana, India’s grain bowl, have started using mechanised harvesters to gather the rice crop, partly to overcome the problem of rising labour costs.” SOURCE: Al Jazeera
Mexico City has a reputation for horrible air pollution–and rightfully so–but Delhi’s air pollution is worse and this year it is off the charts. Much of India faces air pollution problems, but northern India, and especially Delhi sees the convergence of urban, agricultural, demographic, and environmental factors to exacerbate the problems. Geographic problems are often intertwined and is a good issue to use a S.P.E.E.D. or E.S.P.N. activity.
Do you need a case study on how to explore big data like the Observatory of Economic Complexity with students to uncover geographic patterns? This site let’s you ask interrelated questions and enter a rabbit hole of economic, geographic data. This is one of the best online tools for student projects in geography, so let me show you how the data visualizations can be used to make concrete observations that will unearth spatial relationships.
While I was wondering about the world largest coffee exporters, I looked at the Observatory of Economic Complexity’s data visualization tools. I was expecting to find mostly tropical countries where coffee is grown. I was baffled to find that Germany was listed as a major coffee exporter, along with many other Western European countries.
Major Global Coffee Exporters (but definitely not all producers). SOURCE: OEC
This at first seemed like a misprint but many European countries like Germany import import green coffee beans from a variety of tropical countries, so they are a major producer of coffee without growing a single bean. In fact, the world’s largest single port for shipping coffee is Hamburg.
Where does Germany import coffee from? SOURCE: OEC
The highlands of East Africa were the original hearth of coffee beans and today, countries like Ethiopia and Uganda export green coffee beans overwhelmingly to European countries which in turn, roasts them and then exports them internationally.
Which African countries does Germany import coffee from? SOURCE: OEC
African coffee growers face some steep difficulties when it comes to exporting roasted coffee. This “value added” step would certainly increase the trading power of their agricultural commodities on the international trading market, but many European coffee labels already dominate that step in the commodity chain and have the made deep in-roads with consumers.
Exporting the finalized roasted coffee is but a very small part the overall German economy (the largest of the light green boxes-0.26% of total exports). For Ethiopia however, coffee exports is a major component of all their international trade (34.6%). Ethiopia produces something of high value, but is not positioned to extract a lot of profit from that commodity.
This is the crux of what makes decisions about free trade/fair trade difficult for individual consumers that are hoping to “vote with their pocketbook” to put their dollars in economic practices that they approve of. Commodity chains of so many products have become increasingly complex and these goods are more connected with far more places and workers than most would imagine. Simply reading the label does NOT tell the full story of most products and the economic geographies that produced them.
This is just one story about the global economy that can be unearthed by exploring the Observatory of Economic Complexity. Were you wondering about Ethiopia’s cut flowers or Uganda’s gold? There is an entire network of economic relations that waiting to be uncovered if you are curious and willing to explore the data. This is why it is one of the best online tools for student projects in geography.
“Cheese from all around the world comes in different forms, textures, and colors, from white to blue. It’s eaten in many different ways, and some cheeses have legends or myths behind their invention Let’s take a look at what cheese looks like around the world.”
Geographers are drawn to videos like this that give a quick tour around the world. The Travel Insider video channel has a few great examples that show how distinct regional variations in food production create cultural distinct local customs. Food production is inherently cultural, and these videos show how local flavor creates a series of regional variations.
While I’m a fan of the “cheese around the world” video, I’ll include some other of my favorites below. Linked here is a great article showing the amazing diversity of breads around the world. On the food them, there is desserts around the world, sandwiches from around the world, street foods around the world, breads around the world, and off the food topic, but still very cultural, wedding traditions around world as a sampler for the channel.
"Pound for pound, Parmigiano-Reggiano can compete with almost any food for calcium, amino acids, protein and vitamin A – and is prescribed by doctors to cure ailments."
While this article focuses often on the nutritional aspects of Parmigiano-Reggiano, I want people to notice the understated importance of place and the cultural ethos surrounding the production of this product. True, it is an economic industry for the region, but it is also a defining cultural characteristic of the place and a way of life. The place makes the product and the product makes the place.
"Every region enjoys pumpkin pie. But beyond that, there are three Americas: The America that disproportionately has apple pie (New England and the Middle Atlantic), the America that has pecan pie and sweet potato pie (the assorted South), and the America that consumes cherry pie (the Midwest and West)."
In addition to this list of distinctive Thanksgiving recipes from each state (I’d love to try so many on this list), the NY Times has also produced this list of the most ‘Googled’ Thanksgiving recipes in each state. This StoryMap from ESRI is my favorite map of food production, showing where the food on the thanksgiving dinner plate actually came from. These are very late additions to my favorite Thanksgiving day resources. Happy Thanksgiving everyone, and may yours reflect some some regional distinctiveness and cultural context that you appreciate.
GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION 