A consumer's guide to the food system from local to global: our part as citizens in the
interconnected networks institutions and organizations that enable our food choices.
Everybody eats. We may even consider ourselves experts on the topic or at least Instagram
experts. But are we aware that the shrimp in our freezer may be farmed and frozen in Vietnam
the grapes in our fruit bowl shipped from Chile and the coffee in our coffee maker grown in
Nicaragua roasted in Germany and distributed in Canada? Whether we know it or not every time
we shop for food cook and eat we connect ourselves to complex supply networks institutions
and organizations that enable our food choices. Even locavores may not know the whole story of
the produce they buy at the farmers market. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge
series food writer and scholar Fabio Parasecoli offers a consumer's guide to the food system
from local to global. Parasecoli describes a system made up of open-ended shifting and
unstable networks rather than well-defined chains considers healthy food and the contradictory
advice about it consumers receive discusses food waste and the implications for sustainability
explores food technologies (and culinary luddism”) and examines hunger and food insecurity in
both developing and developed countries. Parasecoli reminds us that we are not only consumers
but also citizens and as citizens we have more power to improve the food system than we do by
our individual food choices.
