ABSTRACT
Although agriculture on a global scale has more recently struggled to maintain the ever-improving trends for yield increases, food price reductions, and hunger diminishment that it achieved in the twentieth century, it remains extraordinarily productive, providing abundant food for a large proportion of the world’s people. Because industrial agricultural has done a superb job of “delivering the goods,” many people in the developed and developing worlds have come to take food for granted. When supermarket shelves are always stocked with a cornucopia of edible products, people tend not to devote a great deal of thought to what it takes to get the food onto the shelves. In historical perspective, this is really an unprecedented situation. Ever since Homo sapiens arose some hundreds of thousands of years ago, most humans have had to put the source of their next meals at the top of their list of concerns. But while having a relative abundance of food is a good thing compared to its opposite, it has tended to desensitize us to food issues, to make those of us with good access to food uncritical about how food comes to be.
