What Do We Eat?: How Humans Find, Grow and Share Food

What Do We Eat? How Humans Find, Grow and Share Food, part of the “Orca Timeline” series, includes examples from around the world of problems and solutions to ensuring that everyone has enough food to live and thrive.

Author Megan Clendenan uses humour and word play to engage her readers in the serious topics of climate change, food waste, and equitable food access.

Hungry to find out more? Let’s roll up our sleeves and find out what’s cooking. (p. 2)

These questions mean thinking outside the lunch box to dream up new technologies and clever ideas for eating on the move. (p. 6)

One lunch for world leaders won’t make the food-waste problem go away, but it brought the issue to the table. (p. 69)

What Do We Eat? is organized into five sections: “Food on the Go”; “Under Attack” (eating in conflict zones); “Grow It, Raise It, Find It, Catch It”; “Let’s Eat Together”, and “Enough For Everyone”.

Topics stretch across history and into the future, from how the workers building the Egyptian pyramids were fed, to how astronauts and future space settlers will get their food.

Much of the information is presented in a question and answer format.

If you were stuck on a desert island, what would you eat? In 1965 six teenage boys loaded up a fisherman’s boat with two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a gas burner. (p. 57)

After asking a question and outlining the situation, a bubble identifies challenges faced in answering the question.

Challenges

Weak and hungry from eight days at sea with no food
Volcanic island with steep cliffs to climb
Few tools or supplies

The rest of the story is a tribute to the resourcefulness and cooperation needed to survive in very trying circumstances.

The need to work together to ensure that everyone in the world has sufficient food is a recurring theme throughout the book.

Another question includes a Canadian example.

If you lived in an Arctic region, where would you get your fruits and vegetables? In Nunavut, in the far north of Canada, winters are cold and long. The growing season is too short for most crops. Farming is rare. (p. 73)

As always, students should be encouraged and provided opportunities to think critically about the information presented. For example, the question, “If you were a nomadic Mongolian, what would you eat?”, includes puzzling information that, if climate change is threatening your herds, the answer is to sell the wool from your herds to buy “food items their animals can’t provide” (p. 46). If your herds are threatened, this is going to be a very short-term solution.

Each chapter begins with an illustrated timeline of topics covered. Illustrator Meegan Lim cleverly combines images such as floating lemons and limes, Polynesian explores on a raft, an astronaut on a bike on his way to Mars, beets helping Chinese sailors fight scurvy, and Amelia Earhart on a solo Atlantic flight.

Clendenan and Lim have combined to create an informative book that will engage young readers. What Do We Eat? How Humans Find, Grow and Share Food may even inspire some young readers to ask some important questions about sustainability and accessibility of our current and future food supplies.