Bananas in the Supermarket.

I ate a banana in the morning. It wasn’t a particularly special banana. It was mushy in some parts. It tasted exactly like a bunch of other bananas I’ve eaten before. I bought it during one of my trips to the store because my mom said that our home was low on fruits. That banana was just one of the millions of bananas harvested around the world. Like those millions of bananas, it was packaged. Then it was shipped across the globe by various means of transportation before ending up at that fateful store where I bought it. 

It’s easy to not think about where our food comes from and mindlessly buy it and consume it, but the fact that I can buy bananas harvested in China before going the next aisle over and picking up a can of coffee beans harvested from Colombia and then going to the produce aisle to get some meat that came from a local Washington farm. Just imaging and contemplating that interconnectivity, it’s stunning that our society and our food system has evolved so quickly from being a primarily local endeavor to one that is international in its scale. 

However, it raises questions and worries; our food system is more interconnected than ever. However, it’s also more vulnerable than ever because no longer are problems like bad harvests confined locally; they are now problems that have to be dealt with internationally. Not only that, but this interconnectivity has allowed for abundance, some would even say overabundance of food into our lives. Yet, we still have people in areas going hungry because this abundance is not shared equally amongst the international population. These problems raise the question, has our interconnectivity widened the gap between the haves and the have-nots?, If so is there even a way to make meaningful change is such a large and interconnected food system?