the big picture

A Summary of Our Sitopia

Jialing Zhong the big picture , 0 Comment
food on table
The building blocks of our sitopia, by Lily Banse, 2017, Unsplash.

Hey there! 

We live in a sitopia – a world shaped by food. And food is so much more than just a basic human need – it forms the essence of our culture, with mealtimes being one of the oldest social contracts in history where people come together as a small community to share and enjoy food (Steel, 2020).

But food also has the power to destroy our planet. In our attempts to produce more food than what we can process and consume, the inefficient use of resources causes excess nutrients, dust particles and even toxic substances to enter places where they should not belong – the waterways, soil, atmosphere, as well as living things. Essentially, our actions have been indirectly undermining global food security as we (unintentionally) sabotage our own efforts to produce healthy food to support mankind in a sustainable manner. 

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Review: Air Pollution, Food Production and Food Security

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harvesting crops in field
Harvest season in Pesotum, Illinois, by James Baltz, 2019, Unsplash.

When it comes to food production, air pollution is arguably much more prone to being overlooked than soil and water pollution, due to how it cannot be easily identified by the naked eye. 

However, another bigger issue is how we tend to only consider the impacts of air pollution from the perspectives of agriculture and public health. On the contrary, there have not been many studies performed on the wider implications of air pollution on food security. Today, our review of a journal article, Air pollution, food production and food security: A review from the perspective of food system, by Sun, Dai and Yu (2017) will focus on how air pollution brings about changes in our food system. 

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An Introduction to Sitopian Pollution

Jialing Zhong the big picture 2 Comments
People enjoying a meal at a table.
People enjoying a meal at a table, by Priscilla Du Preez, 2018, Unsplash.

When I first decided on the topic for my pollution blog, I struggled to come up with a title which could encapsulate the complex relationship between food and pollution. It took me a couple of hours before I picked “Sitopian Pollution”, with the first word derived from sitopia, a term coined by Carolyn Steel. 

According to Steel (2020), sitopia comes from the Greek terms sitos (“food”) and topos (“place”), and refers to the idea that our lives are shaped by food. Not only does food keep us alive and well, it also serves a multitude of socio-economic functions. However, I also believe it is exactly this omnipresence of food in our lives that makes pollution in our food system such a critical issue.  Read more