Reading to Be Done Before This Discussion: The Text Below
Things to Bring to Discussion: A printout of this page if you wish.
Due in Discussion This Week: Nothing.
Due in Discussion Next Week: Answers to the questions on the Geography of McGlobalization.
Concepts/Ideas/Places: interconnections, place, scale, geography, consumption, commodity chains, globalization, imperialism, colonialism / the uniqueness and interdependence of places and people.

Context: More than anything else, geography is about spatial relationships—that is, it is about the ways in which people and places are connected to each other and why those connections are possible.  Our goal during the semester will be to see how the study of geography helps us make sense of these complicated connections.  We will discuss important organizing concepts like “regions”, “diffusion”, “spatiality”, “scale” and “place”.  We explore how these concepts get worked out in topical areas such as agriculture, population, politics, urbanism, and so forth.  The point of this discussion is to “brainstorm” about these connections—and the regions, processes of spatiality, diffusion, and scale that determine the nature of localities—both to understand the geographical complexity and to see that you really already do know a lot about geography though you may not have thought about it much yet.  This discussion will help you to picture processes that are described and discussed during lecture for the rest of the semester.

To Prepare for Discussion: When you put sugar in your morning coffee or tea, spread jam on your toast, or have granola for breakfast, you are connecting yourself with places all over the world.  Your coffee may have come from Mexico, South America, Hawaii, Africa, Jamaica, or Indonesia.  Your tea may have been imported from India, Malaysia, Thailand, or China.  Your bread for toast may have been baked here in Valparaiso, but from imported or domestic wheat flour.  The jam on your toast may have been packaged in France, England, or the United States.  The granola you eat may contain rice from Asia, oats from the United States, and nuts from South America or Africa.  In other words, a daily action as banal as fixing a simple breakfast actually reflects a countless number of incredibly complicated economic networks and political decisions, in addition to events that unfolded over centuries of social history.  In order to produce, market, and transport the ingredients which go into your breakfast, people around the world must negotiate labor contracts, trade regulations, economic treaties, production standards, costs, the construction of new industry, government subsidies for particular commodities, and so on.  In addition, what you eat and where it comes from is the result of numerous negotiations carried out in the past.

            Though we seldom think about it, we are all very small components of a very large network (or system) of production and exchange.  This network operates at different levels, or scales, of human interaction—interpersonal, local, regional, and global.  Human activities at each of these scales are shaped by long-developed (but always changing) social, political, and economic processes, including racial discrimination, policy-making, and industrialization.  These networks are linked together by societal structures including government institutions, banks, religious hierarchies, and caste systems.  Moreover, though they are always changing, these networks, processes, and structures are socially reproduced through our everyday activities.  By buying sugar for our breakfast cereal, or by making it, we reproduce (or reinforce) the structure of our everyday lives. 

            All of the activities, structures, and processes in the production of goods and services take place.  They occur in certain sites.  It is the job of the geographer (and geography students) to understand these sites and how they represent the convergence of many human interactions at different points in time and space.  Geographers also want to know how these times and spaces are interconnected.  This discussion asks you to think through the interconnections in your own life by mapping the linkages that make possible a mundane activity like eating breakfast.

            During the discussion, the class will work as a whole to understand the complex “geography of breakfast.”  The class works best when you really let your imagination run wild, and you take the ideas discussed to their logical extremes.  Now is no time to be timid!  During discussion the following questions will be stressed:

·        What did you eat for breakfast?  Was your breakfast at all culturally or regionally specific?  In other words, are corn flakes, scones, breakfast burritos, lattes, pop tarts, etc. consumed everywhere?  Is the type of food you eat affected by economic and political processes, or is it simply “taste”?

·        Where did the ingredients in your breakfast come from?  (First world or third world?)

·        What are all the different networks and activities that must be in place before you can eat breakfast?

·        Who produced those different ingredients, and what conditions were they produced under?  (Mechanized or human labor or both?)

·        Who produced the necessary machinery (farm equipment, chemical plants, trucks, spoons) which made your breakfast possible?

·        Who financed your breakfast (from the earliest stages of food production to the last moments of consumption or waste)?

·        Does it matter what places your food comes from and what social conditions it was produced under?  Why or why not?

·        Is it important - or possible - to consume locally?