Have you ever thought about how your bacon, almond milk, or fish ends up on your table? In our globalized economy, fresh fruit can be shipped from one hemisphere to another to stock grocery store shelves regardless of the season, and many of us enjoy nearly endless choices of cereals, vegetables, meats, and snacks. But a striking number of young children don’t realize that processed foods like chicken nuggets and cheese don’t come from plants. How does a hot dog come to be? Where does our food come from?
Photographer George Steinmetz offers a remarkable look at landscapes, initiatives, and customs that shape how the world eats. His new book, Feed the Planet, chronicles a decade spent documenting food production in more than three dozen countries on six continents, including 24 U.S. states.
Soybean harvest, Fazenda Piratini, Bahia, Brazil
More than 40 percent of our planet’s surface has been molded and tended to produce crops and livestock. From idiosyncratic 16th-century farm plots in rural Poland to Texas cattle feed lots to a large-scale shrimp processing operation in India, food production is rarely observed on this scale. “He takes us places that most of us never see, although our very lives depend on them,” says a statement for the book.
Studies have shown that large-scale agriculture and factory farming send greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in an amount constituting nearly one-third of all human-caused emissions. The ongoing climate crisis can be traced in large part to fertilizers that release nitrous oxide; deforestation caused by farm expansion that adds more carbon dioxide into the air; and emissions from manure management, burning, fuel use, and more.
From a striking aerial vantage point, Steinmetz captures the beauty, ingenuity, and stark reality of factories, aquaculture, family farms, food pantries, and sprawling agricultural operations. He elucidates how staples like wheat, rice, vegetables, fruits, meat, and fish reach both domestic and international tables, tapping into “one of humanity’s deepest needs, greatest pleasures, and most pressing challenges.”
Purchase a signed copy on the photographer’s website, or grab one on Bookshop.
Mauritania was a country of pastoral nomads when it gained independence from France in 1960, but it has since become a nation of fishermen as well, with hundreds of pirogues lining the beach of the capital of Nouakchott. The official annual national landings are around 900,000 tons, but researchers who include illegal or unreported hauls put the catch at more than twice that. With many fish stocks moving north and farther offshore as sea temperatures rise, the competition for fish turned violent in 2023 in neighboring Senegal, where fishermen from the town of Kayar burned drift nets illegally set by fishermen from Mboro in the Kayar Marine Protected Area. In response, the Mboro fishermen attacked Kayar boats with gasoline bombs, killing one boy and wounding twenty others. Government intervention prevented an outright civil war between fishing groups, but tensions are endemic to communities that have grown dependent on declining natural resources. Some 600,000 Senegalese are now employed in fisheries. Fish are a primary source of protein for both Mauritania and Senegal. Working one shrimp at a time, women workers at Avanti Frozen Foods in Yerravaram, Andhra Pradesh, India, can de-shell and de-vein up to 44 tons of farmed shrimp per day from the company’s 1,600 acres of shrimp ponds. Avanti is one of the largest shrimp exporters in India, which dominates the global shrimp export market. About 75 percent of its frozen shrimp is exported to the U.S., with Costco being one of its major customers. Shrimp is the most valuable traded marine product in the world, with an estimated market value of nearly $47 billion in 2022.Modern cowboys conduct wellness checks on horseback at the Wrangler Feedyard in Tulia, Texas, home to around fifty thousand head. Wrangler is one of ten feedlots in Texas and Kansas owned by Amarillo-based Cactus Feeders that collectively can provide feed and care for a half million cattle. At the Wrangler facility, cattle arrive at around 750 pounds, then spend five to six months eating some 20 pounds of dry feed and fodder each day until they reach slaughter weight. Cactus sends more than a million head to slaughter each year, typically to the Tyson beef processing plants in Amarillo, Texas, and Holcomb, Kansas. According to the Texas Farm Bureau, there are more cattle on feedlots within 150 miles of Amarillo than any other area in the world.Just as almond milk has displaced cartons of dairy milk in the grocery store, an old Aermotor windmill that once pumped water for cattle now looms over rows of almond trees and beehives that replaced them near Oakdale, California. The rising popularity of nut milks and almonds for snacking both in the U.S. and overseas has led California growers to triple their acreage in almonds since 1995. Almond orchards now cover 2,500 square miles in the state, growing 80 percent of the global supply and worth more than $5 billion in annual sales. Like cattle, almond trees need copious amounts of water—about 1.1 gallons per nut—as well as hardworking honeybees to pollinate the crop, both of which are in increasingly short supply.A few of the 2,000 workers at the CP Group’s chicken processing plant in Jiangsu, China, prepare broilers for the domestic market, including fast food chains like McDonald’s, KFC, and Burger King. On a typical day they process 200,000 birds and double that number prior to Chinese holidays.Men and women of all races, classes, and religions enjoy a free hot meal at the Sri Harmandir Sahib, better known as the Golden Temple, in Amritsar in Punjab State, India. The gurdwara is the holiest site of the Sikhs, as well as the world’s largest langar, or community kitchen, which provides a free, hot vegetarian meal to 100,000 people, 24/7, all year. The meals consist of roti, or Indian flatbread, rice, a curried vegetable dish, and dal, or lentil soup, which is cooked in giant wood-fired cauldrons in four-ton batches paid for by donations and cooked and ladled out mostly by volunteers. Such langars are a part of every Sikh temple and serve an estimated seven million free meals around the world as an act of charity to all visitors each day.
Canadian Solar and Flow Power have teamed up to deliver the first Flow Power solar project featuring Canadian Solar’s anti-hail modules.
This project will also mark the first deployment of Canadian Solar’s anti-hail technology in Australia.
Set to be delivered in 2025, the South Australian solar and battery energy storage system (BESS) in Coonawarra will provide increased protection for solar panels in extreme weather conditions.
Developed through extensive testing, the company’s anti-hail technology is said to help safeguard solar panels from severe weather, including hailstorms. This is part of Canadian Solar’s commitment to providing durable, high-performance solutions for renewable energy projects in some of the world’s challenging environments.
Based in the Coonawarra wine region, Flow Power’s first project to utilise the technology will be a solar farm paired with a DC-coupled BESS. This project will be the first of many sites where Canadian Solar and Flow Power collaborate to install the company’s anti-hail technology across the country.
“We’re excited to be using Canadian Solar’s TOPCon anti-hail panels in our upcoming energy projects,” said Tom Harrison, Flow Power’s General Manager Energy Projects.
“At Flow Power, we are committed to innovation, and we always work to make each new project better than the last. That includes building smarter, more resilient energy solutions, and the Coonawarra Energy Project is a testament to that mission. By integrating anti-hail technology into our solar farms, we are not only enhancing the durability of our assets, but also ensuring greater reliability for our customers, even in extreme weather conditions.”
“We are proud to partner with Flow Power to bring our advanced anti-hail solar panels to Australian energy projects,” said Dr Shawn Qu, Chairman and CEO of Canadian Solar. “This first project highlights our commitment to providing innovative solutions that enhance the durability and performance of solar energy systems in Australia.”
The first phase of the Coonawarra Energy Project will begin soon, with the solar modules set to be installed in the coming months.
Every month the Good On You team scours the internet to bring you the sustainable fashion and beauty news that matters. Here’s what you need to know in April 2025. Skin In the Game: Mink Coat at Ethical Fashion Show Fuels Sustainability Debate (The Guardian) A report from The Guardian at Paris Fashion Week charts […]
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