The Ecologies of Food Power: An Introduction to the Environment and Food Book Symposium

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of May, 2013, the concentration of C02 in the atmosphere tipped over 400 parts per million (ppm) suggesting that the pathway to a climate changed world is not only accelerating but doing so in ways that are surprising the majority of climate scientists (Bawden, 2013). The supreme irony of this is that, as part of the continuing effort to deliver ever greater quantities of greenhouse gas-rich cheap protein sources, the political ground is being sown in the UK for the growth of US-styled ‘mega’ livestock and fish farms (Milmo and Levitt, 2013). Meanwhile parallel news reports spoke of how UK supermarkets will begin to source chicken fed with GM feeds at the behest of ‘food cartels and GM food giants’ (Dorward, 2013) and, in the US, a unanimous Supreme Court decision strengthenedcorporate control over seed patents to the benefit of the likes of Monsanto (Goldenberg, 2013). At the same time all this was going on, other more ostensibly quotidian stories were being told about how, in Britain, there has not only been a rise in austerity-fuelled hunger (Carr, 2013), but that scientific evidence reveals growing links amongst middle-age obesity, ill-health and dementia (McKie, 2013). To top it all off, the UN is now recommending ‘insect farming’ as a way to not only reduce the environmental impacts of farming, but also feed growing global populations (Vidal, 2013). What all of these seemingly unrelated reports suggest is that not only is there still quite a bit going on in the ‘worlds of food’ (Morgan, et al 2006)—indeed, the above events and reports happened within two