History of Food Consumption
Early in human history, people ate what they could gather or scavenge. Later, people ate what they could plant and harvest and the products of animals they could domesticate. Modern people eat what they can grow, raise, or purchase. Their diets or food composition is determined by income, local customs, religion or food biases, and advertising. There is a global food market and many people historically, in places where food was plentiful, accessible, and inexpensive, humans devoted less time to basic survival needs and more time to activities that led to human progress and enjoyment of leisure. Despite a modern global food system, instant telecommunications, the United Nations, and food surpluses in some places, however, the problem of providing food for everyone on earth has not been solved.
In 1996 leaders from 186 countries gathered in Rome and agreed to reduce by half the number of hungry people in the world by the year 2015. United Nations data for 1998 revealed that more than 790 million people in the developing parts of the world did not have enough food to eat. This is more people than the total population of North America and Europe at that time. The number of undernourished people has been decreasing since 1990. Still, at the current pace of hunger reduction in the world, 600 million people will suffer from "acute food insecurity" and go to sleep hungry in 2015. Despite efforts being made to feed the world, outbreaks of food deficiencies, mass starvation, and famine are a certainty in the twenty-first century.
World Food Source Regions
Agriculture and related primary food production activities, such as fishing, hunting, and gathering, continue to employ more than one-third of the world's labor force. Agriculture's relative importance in the world economic system has declined with urbanization and industrialization, but it still plays a vital role in human survival and general economic growth. Demands on agriculture in the twenty-first century include supplying food to an increasing world population of nonfood producers as well as producing food and nonfood crude materials for industry.
Soil types, topography, weather, climate, socioeconomic history, location, population pressures, dietary preferences, stages in modern agricultural development, and governmental policies combine to give a distinctive personality to regional agricultural characteristics. Two of the most productive food producing regions of the world are North America and Europe. Countries in these regions export large amounts of food to other parts of the world.
North America is one of the primary food-producing and food-exporting continents. After 1940 food output generally increased as cultivated zacreage declined. Progress in improving the quantity and quality of food production is related to mechanization, chemicalization, improved breeding, and hybridization. Food output is limited more by market demands than by production obstacles. Western Europe, although a basic food deficit area, is a major producer and exporter of high-quality foodstuffs. After 1946 its agriculture became more profit-driven. Europe's agricultural labor force grew smaller, its agriculture became more mechanized, its farm sizes increased, and capital investment per acre increased.
Foods from Plants
Most basic staple foods come from a small number of plants and animals.
Continue of the article: Foods from Plants
The World's Growing Population
The problem of feeding the world is compounded by the fact that population was increasing at a rate of nearly 80 million persons per year.
Continue of the article:The World's Growing Population
See also: Food
|
