VOF Week 2: A Nomadic Existence To Connect Different Farmlands

Every day, I count my blessings to have been born in these times. I am a motley mix of identities—a “mutt” if you will—which would have been looked down upon twenty, fifty, one hundred, one thousand years ago. That I am a woman, living and traveling independently in Asia, sharing her voice and opinions with the world, would also have been rejected. Seems the stars have aligned in my favor.

If I had been born during a different era, I would have been considered an outcast, an outsider, no matter where I lived. Born in Brazil, brought up in the USA, with ancestry in Eastern Europe and family in Israel, my current post in China is just a continuation of a multi-ethnic, nomadic trajectory. My voice would have been ignored, my experience shunned. Thanks to our world’s globalized reality, helped in no small way by the rise of new media and the subsequent exchange of ideas across geographic borders, however, my pixelated persona is welcomed as providing an perspective into the realities of a myriad group of women across the globe.

Money speaks, and those who wield it have the power to influence others. Commerce can direct politics and trends. As women, especially in the developed world, increasingly control household purse strings, their conscientiousness as consumers can help the people on the other side of the buy-sell equation. Agriculture is an instrumental element of humanity’s impact on the environment: according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, it accounts for 14 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. And that doesn’t even begin to discuss waste water and water management, land use sustainability, or the quality of the foodstuffs which sustain the world’s body.

I’m now trying to utilize my international insight to help money-wielding women consumers in the developed world understand what their food purchasing decisions can mean for the environment, and for the women living on the farmland who are producing those foods. Consumers, I believe, desire to make educated decisions: they just need access to the information that can help inform them. Likewise, food producers want to feed people well, and produce food efficiently, but their experiences will not be heard unless someone helps them gain access to new media technologies to broadcast their experiences.

World Pulse inspires me. As a media entity, borne in one woman’s mind and growing from curiosity and questioning, to research and exploration, to its founding and development into a print magazine and online media outlet, it has also thrived in today’s inimitable and unparalleled international, technological environment. It supports and broadcasts the experiences of women, worldwide. My contribution, I hope, is to broadcast the experiences of food producing and food purchasing women of that world, to help them understand and help each other.