Securing Food: (Pre)historic Perspectives, Present Challenges, and the Future of Human Subsistence

3 units

For the first time in decades, the number of people suffering from hunger worldwide is on the rise. In 2017, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations warned that mounting pressures on natural resources and climate change have put global food security in jeopardy, calling for necessary transformative change in agriculture and food systems. Securing access to food resources has always been critical to the survival of our species. From hunting and gathering to the factory farm, past and present human societies have employed a diverse spectrum of strategies to keep themselves fed. Some have provided sustenance for millennia, proving their resilience and adapting to climatic and social challenges. Others have emerged more recently, rapidly transforming and interconnecting food systems in unprecedented ways. However, all are the result of long-term and deep-time trajectories shaped by environmental, economic, social, cultural, and political opportunities and needs. Today, we face the legacy of these trajectories in our present struggle to attain and maintain food security for our species. How might an understanding of this legacy and of the context, origins, and effects of food systems in our deep and more recent past inform our understanding and action in the present?