11 November 2022
Human cost of chicken processing with a focus on the US (13 minute watch) – good to see the regulatory and institutional environments and overlaps (and where they don’t) – would be interesting to see/do this for different places or multi-country chains. e.g. what things/chemicals are included for FOOD safety but not EMPLOYEE safety.
Using disappeared objects for information. Interesting from a perspective of structures and frameworks. Interesting overlap with how the concept of extinction is used in a non-natural context (consider, the ‘fitness’ of technology/artefacts for survival). Will be interesting to see ideas like this for technological narratives shaping the solution spaces in food systems work now and seeing systems resilience through artefacts. Very, very, long read.
Continuing my thing of cables – copper cabling on land in the UK. Openreach engineers are currently replacing the copper telephone network with fibre in the UK to kill the landline – deadline of 31 December 2025. This means that after this date, landlines will only work if they are connected to the internet. A changeover affecting 192 million kilometres of cables, 110,000 green cabinets, and 4.9 million telephone poles and junction boxes. Total changeover has happened in places like Salisbury and Mildenhall. New system will mean potentially significant problem for elderly people, and anything depending on analogue phone connections (like most of the care and security system infrastructure such as elevator alarms and even traffic lights). Why is this important? Because quite a lot of technological improvements and solutions seem to assume a level of connectivity – which leaves quite a lot of UK population out RIGHT NOW. And we haven’t even talked about the rest of the world’s cabling yet.
(Sort of corollary – mesmerized crabs next to undersea cables. We are driving the shellfish mad!)
3or5 is a monthly mailing on things in the food systems space that I find interesting
saherhasnain 