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Evan D.G. Fraser

Goodreads Author

Website

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=250415906047

Genre

Nonfiction

Influences

Jared Diamond, Mike Davis, Michael Pollan, Arnold Toynbee, John Raulst ...more

Member Since

March 2010

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Most of my professional work — which is either about analyzing data and writing papers for other academics or researching the history of food for popular books — comes out of my lifelong involvement with nature and the environment. This began in kindergarten, where I horrified teachers and amazed fellow students by bringing in pickled moose bits I had dissected with my naturalist father while accompanying him on summer field work. I followed this up as a teenager cleaning outhouses in national parks, and as an adult where I have dug soil pits in tidal swamps, collected tree samples by snowshoe in the dead of winter, climbed headfirst into bear dens (no bears there at the time), and did battle with fire ants in tropical jungles. I also spent Most of my professional work — which is either about analyzing data and writing papers for other academics or researching the history of food for popular books — comes out of my lifelong involvement with nature and the environment. This began in kindergarten, where I horrified teachers and amazed fellow students by bringing in pickled moose bits I had dissected with my naturalist father while accompanying him on summer field work. I followed this up as a teenager cleaning outhouses in national parks, and as an adult where I have dug soil pits in tidal swamps, collected tree samples by snowshoe in the dead of winter, climbed headfirst into bear dens (no bears there at the time), and did battle with fire ants in tropical jungles. I also spent formative summers working with my grandfather on a farm near Niagara Falls.

More formally, I have a somewhat diverse academic background. Initially, I studied anthropology and Celtic studies at the University of Toronto and focused on the Irish Potato Famine. I then studied forestry and looked at agro-forestry in the tropics. I eventually earned a doctorate from the University of British Columbia, where I wrote my dissertation on sustainable agriculture.

I’ve done a number of field work contracts, and these have taken me across the boreal forests of Ontario, the jungles of Central America, around the farmland of the Pacific West Coast, through urban Thailand, and into the Hills of Northern England. Currently, I do work with colleagues in Malawi, Ghana and Bangladesh as well as the UK and Canada.

All of these projects have involved looking closely at how we produce food, exploring the amazing stories of the people who work the land, and worrying about what climate change might do to the food we eat.

I have published approximately 45 scholarly research articles and book chapters on issues relating to sustainable agriculture, climate change, and "the food system." Links to these publications can be found at my personal website ( www.evandgfraser.com ). I’ve also written a number of policy briefs on environmental issues for senior Canadian politicians, including the Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Minister for the Environment, and the Prime Minister of Canada. I am part of the core team leading two of the United Kingdom’s key research projects on climate change, providing cutting-edge climate predictions and economic impact assessments that are commonly quoted in the media on both sides of the Atlantic. I receive regular invitations to lecture on these issues, and have recently spoken to audiences in Canada, France, Denmark, Austria, and Portugal, as well as to international audiences in Oxford, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, and Leeds.

Although I’m Canadian by upbringing, I have spent considerable time in the UK.

I work at both the University of Guelph (in Ontario) and the University of Leeds.

I am married and have three kids. ...more

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Evan D.G. Fraser's Blog

Global food security and the pending crisis

The following two pod-casts are discussions on global food security and the pending food crisis.

http://wpr.org/wcast/download-mp3-req...

http://castroller.com/podcasts/KerasT...

In them, Evan Fraser and Evan Fraser discuss the themes in
Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilization

Empires of Food Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilization by Evan D.G. Fraser

Combine Editions
Evan D.G. Fraser’s books

Average rating: 3.72 · 446 ratings · 70 reviews · 5 distinct works • Similar authors

	Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilization by Evan D.G. Fraser (Goodreads Author), Andrew Rimas (Goodreads Author) 3.84 avg rating — 355 ratings — published 2010 — 11 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World by Andrew Rimas (Goodreads Author), Evan D.G. Fraser (Goodreads Author), Evan Fraser 3.31 avg rating — 112 ratings — published 2008 — 12 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Uncertain Harvest: The Future of Food on a Warming Planet (Digestions Book 2) by Ian Mosby, Sarah Rotz, Evan D.G. Fraser (Goodreads Author) 4.35 avg rating — 43 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	#foodcrisis: A graphic novel about global food security by Evan D.G. Fraser (Goodreads Author), Scott Mooney (Illustrator), John Perlock (Illustrator) 3.71 avg rating — 7 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	#Foodcrisis really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 1 rating	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Jul 19, 2010 02:30PM

Quotes by Evan D.G. Fraser (?)

“Eating connects us to our histories as much as it connects our souls to our bodies, our bodies to the earth.”
― Evan D.G. Fraser, Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilization

tags: connection, earth, eating, food, history, soul

1 likes

“...eating is the purest mode of consumption. Our purchases are statements about our social class, our friends, and our beliefs. Buying something as continually necessary as food is an ongoing act of self-definition.”
― Evan D.G. Fraser

tags: belief, consumption, food, necessity, people

1 likes

“Plutarch describes how this system worked in reality:

‘But when the wealthy men began to offer larger rents, and drive the poorer people out, it was enacted by law, that no person whatever should enjoy more than five hundred acres of ground. This act for some time checked the avarice of the richer, and was of great assistance to the poorer people, who retained under it their respective proportions of ground, as they had been formerly rented by them. Afterwards the rich men of the neighborhood contrived to get these lands again into their possession, under other people’s names, and at last would not stick to claim most of them publicly in their own. The poor… were thus deprived of their farms.’

Flushed with righteous zeal, Tiberius Gracchus ran for the office of tribune on a platform of redistributing land to the poor so they could fee themselves. The idea, though riotously popular with the plebs, horrified the plantation owners and their moneyed allies. Gracchus won the election, but… the patricians cried that Gracchus was exploiting those same masses to seize power and declare himself king.

...

On the day that Gracchus’s reforms were due for debate in the Curia Julia, the honorable gentlemen of the Senate arrived in a state of eagerness bordering on cannibal savagery… Again, Plutarch describes the scene:

‘Tiberius [Gracchus] tried to save himself by flight. As he was running, he was stopped by one who caught hold of him by the gown; but he threw it off, and fled in his under-garments only. And stumbling over those who before had been knocked down, as he was endeavoring to get up again, Publius Satureius, a tribune, one of his colleagues, was observed to give him the first fatal stroke, by hitting him upon the head with the foot of a stool. The second blow was claimed, as though it had been a deed to be proud of, by Lucius Rufus. And of the rest there fell above three hundred, killed by clubs and staves only, none by an iron weapon.”
― Evan D.G. Fraser, Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilization

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