The Humanist Quinoa Market

Global Humanist Shoptalk by M L Clark

Episode notes

Sometimes the best way to move forward is to think about how we've responded to issues in the past. In this episode of Global Humanist Shoptalk, I reflect on the early-2000s trend cycle for quinoa as a super-food with key global-activist intersections. The aim isn't to criticize any of us for leaping onto a bandwagon, and then reckoning after the fact with the deeper complexities of any food economy issue. It's to think about how this sort of behaviour is in our nature, and how much trends like the quinoa craze illustrate our willingness to try to do better if the opportunity to do better is made commercially available. What could we do with that knowledge, to build better policy for other crises in the world?

Keywords
food economy