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

It's about time! From the past to the present and into the future, the Orca Timeline series explores how big ideas have shaped humanity. Discover what our collective history can tell us about the planet today and tomorrow. Part of the nonfiction Orca Timeline series, with photographs and illustrations throughout, this book examines the innovative ways humanity grows, finds and eats food. What's cooking? Every day, no matter where we are or where we need to go, humans need food. Imagine carrying meals with you as you parachute into a war zone. Or trying to stay well fed while building the pyramids. People have always found ways to work together to put a meal on the table. What Do We Eat? is a delicious celebration of human creativity and cooperation, wrapped up in bite-sized slices of history, with a look at what scientists and inventors are cooking for the future. We are gobbling up Earth's resources, and food is not shared equally. But today there's a magic tree transforming the dry African plains, food "ambulances" on the move and cities that have declared access to food a human right. Hungry to find out more? Let's roll up our sleeves and find out what's for dinner. Key Selling Points - Showcases a range of STEM topics, such as engineering design, agriculture and biology, as well as social studies, geography and history. - Each topic is presented through bite-sized stories about food, covering the Egyptian Pyramid builders, the ancient Roman army, World War II paratroopers, Mars astronauts and more. - Focuses on themes of resourcefulness, innovation, resilience and cooperation, offering many specific, positive examples of humans working together to solve problems and get a meal on the table. - This book is timely, as it discusses the current inequities in access to food as well as the global issue of food waste. As well, it considers the future of food in light of the climate crisis and a growing population, and highlights both innovative technologies and ideas from our past that might help us in the future, such as robotics and sensing, indoor vertical farms, lab-cultured meat, seaweed farming and the eating of insects. - Asks readers to think critically about food, has links to numerous curriculum themes and has been vetted by experts in food security, agriculture, history and environmental studies. - The author is an established writer of nonfiction titles for young people, including Cities, the award-winning Fresh Air, Clean Water and Design Like Nature, all published by Orca. Megan Clendenan enjoys learning about how people ate throughout history and hopes that the foods of the future will be more sustainable and just. She is the author of Cities: How Humans Live Together and the Green Earth Award winner Fresh Air, Clean Water: Our Right to a Healthy Environment. She is a co-author of Design Like Nature: Biomimicry for a Healthy Planet, part of the Orca Footprints series. Megan lives near Vancouver, British Columbia, with her family, where she likes growing vegetables in her backyard. Meegan Lim is an illustrator and arts facilitator striving to nurture community growth and healing through visual arts. She holds a bachelor of design and illustration from OCAD University. Her work primarily focuses on the intersections of food and cultural identity, manifesting through detailed gouache illustrations, digital paintings and risograph zines. Her illustrations have been featured in Chatelaine, Eater, Broken Pencil Magazine and the book What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings. Meegan lives in Brampton, Ontario.