Food desert
  • April 19, 2014

Creating Oases in Food Deserts

by Dan Stone

Food deserts are the areas in cities and rural areas devoid of fresh food, leaving those who live there without cars few options for how to get their hands on nutritious things to eat. The term originated in the early 90s in England, but the problem isn't isolated to Europe. Communities all over the world don't have the access they need. In the U.S., the USDA puts the number at 10 percent of Americans—or 30 million people—who need to drive more than 15 minutes to find something fresh to eat. You can see how your community compares on this map.

For obvious reason, food deserts are considered ...

Photo courtesy NASA
Photo courtesy NASA
Astronauts' last attempt to grow crops aboard the International Space Station in 2010 yielded these brassica plants in the mustard family.
  • April 17, 2014

Houston We Have Some Spinach

by Dan Stone

Exciting news from NASA, which this week will start a new farm in space. Or more straight-faced, a "plant growth unit" that will allow astronauts on the International Space Station to grow salad greens and small herbs. This from NASA:

This study will emphasize the focus on human habitability in space, since growing food in space may greatly improve long-duration spaceflight. Veggie can support a variety of studies used to determine how plants sense and respond to gravity. Astronauts will harvest the plants for further investigation.

NASA has experimented with growing crops in space before. But this device, which is about the size of a microwave oven, will ...

Guerilla gardening
  • April 16, 2014

When Gardening is Graffiti

by Dan Stone

Despite the fact that the world produces an abundance of food each day to feed everyone alive, there are still areas like South Central Los Angeles, one of America's poorest areas, plagued by low education rates and limited access to fresh food. A few years ago, the city tried to drop the "Central" from the name in hopes of rebranding away the stigma of high crime and poor people. It worked as well as you'd think.

I caught up with Ron Finley, an urban farmer and motivational speaker, working to change South Central's current reality. Last year, Finley gave a potent TED talk with an idea to elevate poor ...

Canned tuna
  • April 15, 2014

The Globalization of Edible Things

by Dan Stone
N 51°31'01" W 0°10'13"

Over the past few years, as eaters around the world come to terms with their food and where it comes from, we’ve also learned about the shadowy world of food adulteration, or as it’s commonly known, food fraud. Fraud—when phantom ingredients are hiding in food or cheaper items are passed off as the more expensive version—happens for a few reasons. Usually it’s cost, where substituting ingredients that consumers may never detect can affect the bottom line, especially at large scale.

But questions arise about our food because of its origin, too, which isn’t always easy to pinpoint. The primary agency in the U.S. that tries to root out fraud ...

Photograph by Spencer Millsap
Photograph by Spencer Millsap
  • April 13, 2014

Is Your Country Food Independent?

by Dan Stone
N 51°30'29" W 0°08'03"

In a hyper-connected world, our food also brings us together more than it used to.  Food production has morphed over time from a local agrarian system to a global corporate one replete with imports, exports, and shipments big enough to cross oceans and continents every day.

Here in the U.K., a collection of islands, that’s been great news. The country, like many others, once produced all of its food domestically. But as tastes evolved and shipping became cheaper, more food started to come from abroad. Now people from England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland import 38 percent of all food they eat.

That number isn’t exorbitant (at least not compared ...

Photograph by Spencer Millsap
Photograph by Spencer Millsap
  • April 11, 2014

How a Food Becomes Famous

by Dan Stone
N 52°30'33" E 13°23'25.4"

Nothing defines a country and its people so clearly as a national food—a  dish that, when done right, tastes like the country from where it came.

National foods are so easy to categorize because of what they represent. A few hundred calories can sum up a people’s history, values, and economy. That’s how we know pasta was popularized in Italy, where pre-Renaissance eaters realized the food was cheaply made and easily stored. Sushi's origin story harkens back to Japan and an era with limited food access other than the nearby ocean. Apple pie became a symbol of American prosperity in the early 20th century thanks to an abundance of ...

Brandenburg Gate
  • April 9, 2014

The Economics of Finding a Good Restaurant

by Dan Stone
N 52°31'05.3" E 13°23'09.8"

A new place can rise or fall in your mind based on what you eat. Which is why, when it’s meal time abroad, I’ve often relied on a technique I once learned from economist Tyler Cowen. The eateries that guide books recommend are usually flooded with tourists, which by definition means they're often devoted more to speed and ambiance than to good food.

So Cowen recommends buddying up to a local, someone forced to spend time with you and whose interests are aligned with yours—someone who doesn’t care to pay exorbitant prices for food, or hang out with visiting tourists. Who better than a taxi driver?

When I arrived in ...

Onward photo
  • April 7, 2014

Kicking Off “Onward: Food”

by Dan Stone

We're heading out on the road again. This time, Spencer and I (that's us up top) are going around the world to report on food. Not just what we eat, but why we eat it, and how it's grown, prepared, and shipped. Food is, in many ways, the story of humanity and how our species came to dominate our planet. The narrative mixes history and economics and culture. With millions of tentacles in every area of the globe, food production is the biggest industry in the world—worth, according to World Bank estimates, about five trillion dollars each year.

Of course describing food with statistics can make it easy to ...

gear photo
  • April 4, 2014

There’s No Such Thing as Packing Light

by Dan Stone

Before we jet off next week, I wanted to re-up this old post about going on assignment. So much of what we do at National Geographic is devoted to the final product, the fancy photos and deeply reported stories, that we don't often show the process. In fact the question we hear most often on the road is "What do you take with you?"

So here's the rough look of what happens when you lay out our gear end to end. It's mostly cameras and equipment to hold or move the cameras or store its data. The rest is a bunch of notebooks and a pair of laptops ...

Photograph by Spencer Millsap
Photograph by Spencer Millsap
  • March 31, 2014

The Science of Predicting the Future

by Dan Stone

While most of the world watched soccer or did laundry on Sunday, a group of scientists at the office of the United Nation’s Environment Program in Kenya hit publish on a report about the future of Planet Earth so comprehensive that it would take three reams of paper—500 pages each—to print.

Its takeaways have been widely publicized and highly forecasted and may boil down to this: The world is on shaky footing. A changing climate over the next several decades will have sweeping impacts over all areas of human civilization. Warmer global temperatures will restrict access to water, reduce food yields, and heighten tensions between countries ...