3-2 Journal Food Production PDF

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Journal on Food Production...

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3-2 Journal: Food Production Sarah Ellen Fitch ATH-101 7/30/2020

Food production was birthed from necessity. The early humans lived in wooded environments and hunted for food. The wood provided coverage and a dense habitat for big game. When the climate began to shift, the vegetation began to change and hunting large animals became more difficult. And as human population began to grow, animals migrated or began to die off, forests became more sparse or died and early humans had to look further for food. They started to hunt smaller prey and eventually began to raise their own food through farming and growing crops. This led to settling down into more sedentary lifestyles in order to sustain food production (Ember et all, 2015). While farming was an indispensable asset for survival, it had its disadvantages as well. While access to food was an advantage of agriculture, health declined. Agriculture caused people to form communities in which population density may have led to the increase in infectious diseases, higher mortality rates, and a decrease in general health (Larson, 1995). The early agricultural communities also paved the way for what we know today as states. People began to stockpile resources and class division began to form in result. Whoever has the resources has the power. There, we began to see the forming of hierarchies. We also see the immersion of taxation, record keeping, law, infrastructure, and the finer parts of our culture, such as art. (Feder, 2010). When I think how profoundly agriculture has impacted our modern society, I think of how our entire socio-economic structure was built around it. It was the foundation for how we live as a society today. The downsides of our modern states and agriculture, are that with dense population, comes a higher need for mass production. In trying to make our lifestyle sustainable we have developed ways to increase efficiency, sometimes at a price. Factory farms where livestock is crowded into small pens to save space, vegetables and grains are genetically modified to create hardier and higher yielding crops, and toxic pesticides are used to keep pests away. This leads toward a decline in nutritional quality and in the world around us, I see vitamin deficiencies, obesity, chronic illness and genetic disorders on the rise. When I think about how this effects my life, I see that because of the high demand, we have sacrificed quality. In order to eat healthier foods, it must be bought at a much higher price and you must put more work into finding better quality products. This makes it harder to sustain optimum health for our families.

Agriculture has been a blessing and a curse, but I think we can all agree that humanity and the world as we know it, could not exist without it.

References:

Ember, C. R., Ember, M., & Peregrine, P. N., (2015), Human Evolution and Culture, Highlights of Anthropology,(Eighth Edition) Pearson Education. Feder, K. L. (2010). The past in perspective: An introduction to human prehistory (4th ed.). Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company. Larsen, C. S. (1995). Biological changes in human populations with agriculture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 185–213....