Ground Level

Ground Level Category Archive: Hunger

Can ag feed the world without destroying it? Looking for the Minnesota answer

Posted at 11:30 AM on April 9, 2012 by Dave Peters (3 Comments)
Filed under: Hunger, Local Food, Rural, Water quality

If you've heard Jon Foley on MPR News talk shows or seen him give presentations at the University of Minnesota or elsewhere, you've seen him work pretty hard at looking for a middle ground.

He directs the Institute on the Environment at the U and one of his main arguments is that the world needs to look at agriculture in a different way. It's huge greenhouse gas emitter; it's a huge consumer of the world's water; it's rapidly changing land use everywhere. But it's not going away and it in fact has to provide more food for more people in coming decades. How does the world accomplish that? As Foley puts it, how do we feed the world without destroying it?

farm-combine.JPG

What brings this to mind is that a 17-minute TED talk he gave a couple years ago went up on the national TED home page this month. It's worth a look.

Undoubtedly there are responses to Foley's question that could be taken up at a variety of international and national forums. But, given the reporting we've done here on local food, cleaner water, hunger and other Minnesota community issues, seeing the talk made me wonder how people on the ground in Minnesota might address them. Locally, not globally.

So, what can people on the ground in Minnesota do to address the dual demand on modern agriculture -- feed the world but don't wreck it? If you have an answer, add a comment.

(Disclosure: One of my daughters works at the Institute.)

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Ground Level adds Minnesota hunger to coverage

Posted at 10:25 AM on June 3, 2011 by Dave Peters (1 Comments)
Filed under: Hunger, Local Food


One out of 10 Minnesotans struggles sometimes to find adequate food.

These are not the emaciated, starving we sometimes see in news coverage from around the world, but people the federal government classifies as "food insecure." That can mean skipped meals, not knowing how to pay for the next trip to the grocery store, cheap calories.

By a number of measures, more Minnesotans are falling into this category -- more tell surveyors they have difficulty finding meals, more use food stamps, more use food shelves.

hunger photo.jpg

So for several months, MPR News reporter Julie Siple has been exploring the contours of this issue. She's covered food waste, missed meals, the changing face of food shelves, how school lunch programs address the problem in summer. And she's written about the people taking action to make a difference.

Ground Level has pulled this archive of stories together and added background material, data and a collection of additional resources to learn more. It's a one-stop shop of sorts and is the latest in a collection of topic pages we're building to help Minnesotans learn about challenges in their communities and find avenues to take action.

Check it out here.

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