3 different e-reserves

After reading about the neem tree, it really made me think about how unfair the global system can actually be. The tree has been used in India for centuries for things like natural pesticides, medicine, and even everyday items. However companies like W.R. Grace then developed products from it and tried to patent them. That’s what the reading calls “biopiracy,” and it honestly just feels like taking something that already existed and then claiming it as something new. It’s frustrating because the knowledge originally came from other people like local farmers and communities, yet they don’t end up benefiting from it. This shows how global corporations really can take advantage of traditional knowledge and turn it into profit.

Looking at the idea of the “local trap,” definitely changed how I think about local food. I had always assumed local automatically means better but the reading explains that’s not necessarily true. For example, a local farm could still use unsustainable methods while larger-scale system might actually be more efficient or fair in some cases. The authors argue that scale, local vs global, doesn’t determine whether something is good or not. In fact, it is more about the power and how the system is run. I think that’s quite important because it stops us from just blindly supporting local food without thinking about the bigger picture on a wider scale. 

Going through the food miles article, it made me realise how misleading some of the common statistics are. The idea that food travels around 1,500 miles sounds convincing, but it actually came from a very limited study of produce going to Chicago, not all food. Also, the reading explains that transport only makes up about 11% of food’s total emissions, while production accounts for around 83%. I did not expect this to be the case. It also mentioned that changing your diet like eating less meat, can have a bigger impact than just eating local. At the same time, people don’t choose local food just because of distance. They usually choose it based off of things like freshness, supporting local farmers and feeling connected to where your food comes from matters more. That idea of “place” stood out to me though because it shows food is about more than just numbers.