How Does Food Shape Our Cities?

“How Does Food Shape Our Cities?”

In this “Ted Talk” Carolyn Steel speaks on how our cities use and abuse the food and resources that we have in the world. In 2009 she was actually given an article by the Ecologist magazine as one of the United Kingdom’s top ten 21st century visionaries. Her audience could be anyone, but in the bio she is in the U.K. So she’s speaking to the people in the United Kingdom. Maybe even those of us who just live in the cities. Carolyn is trying to get us to realize what tearing down clean, clear pastures of grain and/or fruits and vegetables is doing to our bodies as well as our world. She is trying to convince us of this by showing us how fast the cities build up and expand out and making us aware of how we receive this food coming to us.

There are ethos used in her Ted talk. Here are a few examples. “We live in places like this as if they’re the most natural things in the world.” (Paragraph 3) “Food is our greatest shared need --- which makes it our greatest potential asset.” (From Carolyn’s Bio) “If we recognize its power to connect, we can harness it as a tool to the shape the world for the better.” (From Carolyn’s Bio)

There are pathos examples used in her Ted talk. Here are the examples I found in the paragraphs. “And even though there is food that we are producing at great cost, we don’t actually value it.” (Paragraph 6) “I feel a bit like a weather woman doing this.” (Paragraph 14) “It’s just the look on the face of the dog.” (Paragraph 25) “Allegory of Good Government.” (Paragraph 29) The last example could very well be pathos and/or logos. “A billion of us are obese, while a further billion starve. None of it makes very much sense.” (Paragraph 6) I think with most of these examples she’s trying to be humorous to connect with the audience. And she gets the response that she’s looking for from them.

There are also examples of logos. Here are the examples she uses for the logos in her Ted talk. I previously used the example “A billion of us are obese, while a further billion starve. None of it makes very much sense.” (Used in paragraph 6 of the ted talk.) This example could be used as logos as well as it could be used as pathos. “And as more of us move into cities, more of that natural world is being transformed into extraordinary landscapes like the one behind me – its soybean fields in Mato Grosso in Brazil – in order to feed us.” (Paragraph 3) “By 2050, it’s estimated that twice the number of us are going to be living in cities. Leaving six billion carnivores hungry.” (Paragraph 5) “Nineteen million hectares of rainforest are lost every year to create new arable land.” (Paragraph 6) “80 percent of global trade in food now is controlled