And Now, A Parting Thought From Trey Popp…


I’ve spent the last two days at a Penn-hosted conference titled “Feeding Cities,” focusing on urban agriculture, food security and safety, and the challenges posed by a world in which roughly a billion people eat too little, a billion eat too much, and another billion don’t get their vitamins.

As you might imagine, plenty of people here are talking about things like the Chinese melamine scandal, Cargill‘s 2011 recall of 36 million pounds of ground turkey, and similar symptoms of highly centralized corporate food-supply chains.  But it took Kevin Morgan, a professor of governance and development at Cardiff University in the UK, to come up with a zinger that shows how truly fucked up our food system has become:

“By the way,” he digressed during a panel on peri-urban land preservation, “we think the horsemeat scandal in Europe is the first instance of food adulteration in history that actually improved the nutritional profile of the food involved.”

Eat well this weekend, folks!