Jacana Media Weekend Special: An Empty Plate and Darwin’s Hunch
More about the book!
Jacana Media is running a special offer on two books containing stunning and consequential research by two South African visionaries.
Buy your copies here (quickly, to qualify for your Weekend Special 50% discount!). Quote coupon code RESEARCH50 at checkout.
The offer is valid until midnight, Monday 3 October.
An Empty Plate: Why We are Losing the Battle for Our Food System, why it Matters, and how We Can Win it Back
Tracy Ledger
Why is it that food prices are so high that millions of South African families go hungry, while the prices paid to farmers for that same food are so low that many cannot stay in business? Why are the people who produce our food – farmworkers – among the most insecure of all? Why do high levels of rural poverty persist while corporate profits in the food sector keep rising? How did a country with a constitutional right to food become a place where 1 in 4 children is so malnourished that they are classified as stunted? An Empty Plate analyses the state of the South African agri-food system. Tracy Ledger demonstrates how this system is perpetuating poverty, threatening land reform, entrenching inequality and tearing apart our social fabric. The book asks two crucial questions: how did we get to this point and how might we go about solving the problem. This is a story of money, of power, of unanticipated consequences, and of personal and social tragedy. But it is also a story of what is possible if we reimagine our society and build a new system on the foundation of solidarity and ethical food citizenship.
Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins
Christa Kuljian
There is broad agreement in the scientific world today that all humans share common origins in Africa, but when Charles Darwin first suggested it in 1871, few European scientists took his theory seriously. When the Taung child skull was found in South Africa in 1924, Raymond Dart supported Darwin’s theory, but it did little to shift scientific opinion. In the 1980s, when genetics research concluded that all living humans can trace their maternal ancestry back to Africa 200 000 years ago, many international scientists were slow to accept this claim. Scientists, and their research, are often shaped by the prevailing social and political context at the time. Kuljian explores this trend in South Africa and provides fresh insight on the search for human origins – in the fields of palaeoanthropology and genetics – over the past century.
Categories Non-fiction South Africa
Tags An Empty Plate Christa Kuljian Darwin’s Hunch Jacana Media Tracy Ledger
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