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A world that hungers for packaging

Since the dawn of humankind, food has been the most basic need.

But only with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution during the 19th century did agriculture become organized enough to permit people to leave behind the hunt-and-harvest survival mode and begin an era of expansion. As people became less tethered to the land and began clustering in towns and cities, a new discipline of food preservation and protection was required so that the bounty of the land could still reach them. That’s why the transition from rural to urban societies was also a time that saw the modernization of agriculture and the growth of a distribution infrastructure to feed the newly industrialized West. Central to these developments was the emergence of packaging capable of protecting food as it made its way from field to fork.

Although Western societies have evolved in this manner, other parts of the world still cling to their agrarian roots. So even though enough food is grown on this planet to feed every living person probably well into the next millennium, more than half the food grown or harvested spoils while in the distribution mode. Despite knowledge of the use of protective packaging to help deliver safe and nutritious foods to large numbers of people, too many of the earth’s population are not yet able to take advantage of this knowledge. Until world leadership recognizes integrated food delivery systems as fundamental to existence and meaningful progress, children and adults will be hungry, nutritionally deprived, and ill. Too many millions will die each year.

Logic and reason dictate that the more widely we apply food science and its sub-categories, including food packaging, the sooner we’ll find ourselves on the right route to saving a mighty precious resource: the human race. The simplest analysis of food distribution demonstrates that erecting barriers to the ever-hostile natural environment of water, water vapor, microorganisms, insects, animals, and debris is fundamental to preserving food. And the best barrier yet devised is that much-maligned but potentially heroic thing known as food packaging.

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