kab

I like the artwork and intention but the writing is awkward to troublesome. There's a white feminist implication that ‘of course' racism didn't exist in France. Two women incidental to a featured woman are called ‘jealous shrews'. Just a couple of examples.

DNF 8%

1.5 She invokves fucking Malthus in chapter 1, extending the idea that reproduction rates and the ‘lack of infrastrucutre' are responsible for hunger and food waste in the Global South, deflecting blame from neo/colonialist capture, wealth extraction, and exploitation. She has some puzzle pieces with decent stats but misplaces them amidst her noodling with an onslaught of what dead white men have spouted.

‘Having had the temerity to mention food, death and morality all in the same breath, Malthus is, perhaps inevitably, the figure around which the ‘feed the world' debate tends to galvanise. By raising the issue of population, he ventured into territory that for many remains taboo even today. Yet to discuss how we should eat without addressing the question of population is at best limited and at worst meaningless, since the two problems are so obviously connected. Malthus may have been a doom-mongering pessimist, but his theory is yet to be proven wrong. However responsibly we farm, fish, hunt or gather, our appetites continue to shape the planet and affect the life chances of us and our fellow earthlings.'

‘Factory farming, by contrast, is almost comically inefficient. One third of the global grain harvest is now fed to animals, food which, if we ate it directly, could feed up to ten times as many people.

‘To compound matters, we're not great at managing the food that we do produce. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), farmers worldwide currently provide the daily equivalent of 2,800 calories of food per person – more than enough to go round, given an ideal food system.'

‘...if Western nations limited their food supplies to just 130 per cent of their nutritional needs and developing states could reduce post-harvest losses to levels similar to those in the developed world, one third of the global food supply could be saved, enough to feed the world's hungry twenty-three times over.

At least three works in a row are variations of the same essay on globalism. The introduction on the power of art is trenchant. The rest I skimmed were meandering, dense, and glancing, even when I wanted them to pierce me. The repetition and lack of notes of context made it easy to drift away on this collection.

Engagingly designed with fun project ideas. It ramps up fast in the JavaScript section. Just a note that in the JS for the game, hyphens (minus signs) should be used but en dashes appear in the book. Also for the online resources, whoever named the image files capitalised them instead of using what's referenced in the CSS.

Five pages in: fully invested in the myth of meritocracy, a ratio of 1 to 12 signalling neither sexism nor racism, and an apolitical Nobel prize

The format of a page a day is superb, not overwhelming. The words are well-chosen, usefully balanced between not too common and not too obscure, but the paragraphs that are supposed to introduce the words in context are so awkward and unnatural.

The categories were helpful, including rainy day hikes and kid-friendly hikes. GPS coordinates to trailheads would have been convenient, as the directions were generally unclearly described. Incidentally, the ‘Mt. Rundle, South Summit' hike is marked EEOR (East End of Rundle) at the trailhead.

No story of captivating power could ever be set in Edmonton. It is a city that inspires lists of things, at the edge of publishability.