Thursday, August 05, 2010

Our Common Taco

One of my Bread for the World friends recently shared a fascinating link on Facebook. The link was posted on site called The Good Blog

At the very top of the post is a huge map of the world with several curvy lines criss-crossing the globe.  This is all part of a project developed by landscape architect David Fletcher and members of the art and design studio Rebar for a class called Urbanlab at the California College of the Arts.  The project looked at the complexities of globalization using a taco.

Here are a couple of paragraphs describing the project:
The goal was to map the local “tacoshed,” which, much like a watershed, establishes the geographical boundaries of a taco’s origins—the source of everything from the corn in the tortilla to the tomatoes in the salsa.

By thoroughly understanding what it takes to make a taco, the class hoped to become “better able to propose and design a speculative model of a holistic and sustainable urban future.” The final product is a surprisingly useful microcosm of the industrial food system and its “richly complex network of systems, flows, and ecologies.” According to the class findings, within a single taco, the ingredients had traveled a total of 64,000 miles, or just over two and a half times the circumference of the earth.

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