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Tropical foods — coffee, tea, chocolate, sugar, bananas — are all part of daily life.When we consume these foods, we are engaging in tangible but often invisible relationships with distant peoples and landscapes. Professor Stuart McCook, History, is an environmental historian exploring the origins of these relationships and how they have contributed to environmental change. The transformations to the landscape have sometimes unforeseen environmental consequences that include outbreaks of crop diseases and pests. Professor McCook's study of the global crop epidemic, coffee rust, which has devastated coffee farms around the globe for the past century and a half reveals that these diseases are not just accidents, but reflect historical patterns of globalization, production, and consumption. |
