BY SIMONE ANZION

IonE resident fellow Randel Hanson, a faculty member in the Department of Geography at the University of Minnesota Duluth, is working to create institutional change around food systems. He has developed a 10-acre organic farm to grow produce for UMD dining services. The farm provides dining services with an opportunity to reintegrate minimally processed foods and move toward procuring more produce from area farmers. It also provides students with experiential learning opportunities around food and agricultural systems.

In effort to institutionalize sustainability around food, Hanson has spent a lot of time bringing together the different parts of the University to build a more collaborative, sustainable system. Hanson says, "These entities - administrative, academic, operations, etc. - have evolved rationally to do their job, but they often work irrationally in relation to one another from the viewpoint of sustainability, at cross purposes in carrying out their respective missions, and most often in ways that make each other's work less fluid." He says there remain significant challenges to move from symbolic to more substantive changes as well to institutionalize the project.

Hamburger or hummus? Organic or conventional? Mediterranean diet or McDonald's?

If you're puzzled by which dietary choices are truly the most sustainable when you consider that what we eat affects not just our health but also the environment and the well-being of others, check out Sustainability of Food Systems: A Global Life Cycle Perspective, a new MOOC (massive open online course) developed and taught by IonE resident fellow Jason Hill, McKnight Land-Grant Professor in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences.

The eight-week course, which begins in May and is offered online at no charge through Coursera, will provide an overview of our global food system and its many impacts, from the individual to the global scale. Participants will gain appreciation of the complex implications of choices that are made along the food supply chain and be challenged to think critically about how the global food system may need to change to adapt to future economic and environmental conditions.

No special background is required for the course. Participants will investigate current topics in food sustainability and have the opportunity to participate in discussions with other participants from all over the world. Case studies, readings and other resources will emphasize that responsible decisions about what to eat require that we consider the entire global food supply chain and its full set of economic, environmental and social consequences.

Like to learn more? Check out Sustainability of Food Systems: A Global Life Cycle Perspective for details and registration information.

By Paul West

Ever wonder which crops are grown where? Looking for crop and pasture data to use in a research project? Need a map for your report or presentation? We've got you covered.

The Institute on the Environment's Global Landscapes Initiative and McGill University's Land Use and the Global Environment (LUGE) recently launched EarthStat, a website for viewing and downloading agriculture and land use data developed in collaboration between our institutions. These data have become the standard used by many institutions around the world, and we hope this new site will broaden their use and influence. The site serves data on current and historical cropland and pasture area, as well as more detailed yield and harvested area for 172 crops. Yield potential, yield gap and climate bins are available in NetCDF, Geotiff, ASCII, Google Earth(KMZ), and PNG formats.

We'll be updating the map viewer and download pages with additional data sets in the coming months. Please take a few minutes to check out the site, share it with your friends, and post comments below.

Special thanks to Peder Engstrom for creating the site!

Paul West is chief collaboration officer for the Institute on the Environment's Global Landscapes Initiative. Follow him on Twitter: @coolfireconserv Image courtesy of Peder Engstrom.

German tradition says eating herring at midnight on Dec. 31 brings good fortune for the year to come. Is herring part of your New Year's celebration? If not, here's your big chance!

Lake Superior's lake herring, also known as cisco or inland tullibee, are an environmental success story. Once supplying up to 19 million pounds of commercial catch per year, lake herring populations plummeted in the 1960s and '70s due to overfishing, habitat loss and the introduction of rainbow smelt.

The opening of the American Museum of Natural History's new exhibition, Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture, this Saturday (Nov. 17) comes at an interesting time. 

The exhibit, which will look at food production throughout history and address the challenge we currently face of feeding an ever-growing population without destroying the planet as we do so, comes just days before Thanksgiving, the nation's holiday most focused on food as celebratory act. Obviously, as this is an annual holiday, the exhibition planners no doubt planned the opening with Thanksgiving in mind. The second reason the timing is interesting, though, is due to an event that no one could have anticipated well in advance. The AMNH is located in New York City, which, along with other areas of the East Coast, is still recovering from Hurricane Sandy. In recognition of these dichotomous events, Ellen V. Futter, president of the AMNH, said in a press release, "As the Museum prepares to open this comprehensive exhibition on the subject of food, we find ourselves disquietingly poised between the extremes of Hurricane Sandy--with its extensive devastation, including disruption to the food supply--and...Thanksgiving. In such a timely and vivid context, the Museum presents Our Global Kitchen, which addresses the vital and complex topic of food from the perspectives of the environment, food supply, and human culture."