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What should we do when the robots get our job

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Reports that robots, automation and artificial intelligence are going to put millions of us out of work may sound troubling, but should we believe them? That largely depends on whether we're technology optimists or pessimists. In our Future of Work series we look at how jobs might change in the future.

The Snewing family lived in 62 Falkner Street, Liverpool, for more than four decades. They were saddlers working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And while the horse-drawn economy dominated, they enjoyed a brisk trade.

But then, as the BBC Two series A House Through Time relates, along came the motor car.

Rival saddlery businesses saw the lie of the land and turned to making leather footballs, handbags and luggage instead. The Snewings sadly carried on regardless and eventually went out of business.

That, in a nutshell, is the challenge we face when new technologies come along. Adapt or die.

But it is the pace of technological change that is unprecedented in the modern era and which poses the greatest challenge for jobs.

These days algorithms dictate the automated trading of trillions of dollars' worth of assets in the financial markets. Artificially intelligent chatbots are taking over from humans in call centres. And soon, planes and cars could be operating autonomously, putting in jeopardy the livelihoods of those who drive professionally.

Robots have been doing the repetitive drudge work in our factories for decades. But now they can flip burgers, flick away unripe tomatoes on a high-speed sorting machine using image recognition, lay bricks, even co-operate to open doors and escape.

Giant 3D printers can make houses out of concrete in a fraction of the time humans can.

Burger-flipping robot taken offline

What happens when AI meets robotics?

Robots to 'take 800 million jobs by 2030'

How long will it take for your job to be automated?

The International Federation of Robotics says in manufacturing there are now 74 robot units per 10,000 employees on average, compared with 66 units in 2015. The highest growth rate is in Asia, China in particular.

And software automation, informed by machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), will have a profound effect on our workplaces and the jobs we do.

"AI is a big threat to low-skilled jobs, no question," says Bernard Louvat, general manager of digital customer engagement solutions at tech firm Nuance.

"I don't think we're ready to handle this problem yet."

He thinks clever chatbots will replace most call centre staff within 10 years.

"A virtual assistant can handle 60%-80% of all customer conversations now without any need for a human agent to intervene - five years ago it would have been 25%-30%," he says.

"Chatbots are certainly eliminating jobs - we need fewer and fewer human agents each year. The ones that are left will be highly skilled super-agents looking after the most complicated cases."

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Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85% of questions will be answered by virtual assistants.

When you think that a huge telecoms company like AT&T employs about 100,000 call centre agents to look after its 120 million customers, that's a lot of jobs that could disappear pretty quickly.

But the cost-savings are too big for large corporations to ignore. And they say customer satisfaction increases as these chatbots learn from the millions of previous customer conversations and become smarter.

Consultancy Accenture says 81% of executives it interviewed think that within two years AI will be working next to humans in their organisation as "a co-worker, collaborator and trusted adviser".

A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute concluded that nearly two thirds of all jobs could have a significant chunk - at least 30% - of their activities automated by 2030.

That could affect 800 million roles, it said.

But McKinsey also acknowledged that this new technology "will also create new occupations that do not exist today, much as technologies in the past have done".

Could the saddler of the past ever have imagined the roles of car mechanic, smartphone app developer or drone pilot?

The Industrial Revolution from the late 17th Century onwards saw mechanisation sweep through many industries. Farming in particular, which accounted for around 50% of all jobs across Europe, saw that percentage dwindle to less than 5% now.

Such upheaval was undoubtedly painful for those unable to adapt, but new types of employment came along eventually.

More recently, there have seismic changes to the global economy. In the last 30 years, we've had digital transformation, the rise of the internet, globalisation. But figures from the World Bank show that global unemployment as a percentage of total labour force has actually fallen from 6.1% in 1991 to 5.8% in 2017, despite the population rising from 5.4 billion to 7.6 billion over the same period.

Robotic process automation - RPA - will remove the need for staff to do boring, repetitive, rules-based activities, such as inputting data or handling payroll, tech optimists say.

"This is an evolution of work - the type of work we do will change," says Ian Barkin, co-founder of Symphony Ventures, an RPA specialist with clients such as Lloyds Banking Group and US payroll giant ADP.

"RPA doesn't have to lead to a culling of staff, it can empower them and unleash their creativity. It's freeing them from doing the unproductive stuff."

Mary McDowell, chief executive of video-conferencing provider Polycom, envisages a time where AI will effectively run virtual meetings for us, using facial recognition to identify who's speaking and calling up relevant documents and statistics to support points being made.

"The management of sound and video will be so much better," she says. "Participants will feel like they're actually present and augmented reality will help us collaborate and annotate documents much more productively.

"Meetings will be about the ideas, not the mechanics. Without technical barriers we can focus on the work at hand, whether that's providing telemedicine or distance learning services."

But even the optimists admit that as low-skilled jobs disappear, people will need to learn new skills to compensate.

"This calls on us all to focus on up-skilling," says Mr Barkin. "There's an urgent need for education reform - people need to learn design thinking, creativity, analytics, programming."

Research by job site Indeed finds that in the last three years demand from UK employers for AI specialists has almost tripled.

"Technology can lead to job reductions, but it doesn't have to. This could be a huge good news story," concludes Mr Barkin.

Just don't carry on making saddles when the car is driving down the street towards you.

In the rest of this series we will look at the new types of job that could emerge in the age of robots, AI and automation.

Follow Matthew on Twitter.

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Adapt or die: How to cope when the bots take your job

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Reports that robots, automation and artificial intelligence are going to put millions of us out of work may sound troubling, but should we believe them? That largely depends on whether we're technology optimists or pessimists. In our Future of Work series we look at how jobs might change in the future.

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Making me hungry, it looks delicious (/ω＼)

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SEATTLE - As great restaurants will do, JuneBaby pulled me in from more than one direction. The first of course was the sheer pleasure of the cooking. (Without that, the others wouldn't matter.) The food is Southern, which I was primed to like before I walked through JuneBaby's Dutch doors in this city's Ravenna neighborhood. And whenever Edouardo Jordan's menu offered a dish I'd expect to see at a Southern restaurant, he gave me something better than I'd imagined.

Fried catfish over grits can be better in theory than reality. At JuneBaby, the fish, from an Idaho farm, is firm, tight, fresh and free of bottom-feeder muddiness. The crust is semolina, which stays crisp and unsoggy. The grits are fluffy, yellow, full of corn flavor. Ringing the grits is an orange circle of shrimp bisque. Strictly speaking, shrimp bisque has no business on fish and grits, but if you see the bisque as a tamer, richer stand-in for hot sauce it makes a delicious kind of sense.

This is the tactic - find superior ingredients and bring some fancy kitchen tricks to bear on them - favored by most of the South's prominent restaurants. If that were all Mr. Jordan had in mind, I would still think JuneBaby is a very good restaurant. But on the menu of this nearly year-old establishment are dishes that I wasn't expecting, that many of those other restaurants don't serve, that pulled me in deeper.

Like any good Southern chef, Mr. Jordan loves his pork. But I paid closer attention when I noticed which parts of the pig he's cooking. He will boil ham hocks with collard greens until the leaves are soft and velvety and wonderfully smoky. He stews pigs' ears until they surrender their ornery stiffness, then slices and fries them into irresistible, crunchy sticks. He seasons okra and tomatoes with a North African spice mix and stews them with hog maw, otherwise known as the outer wall of the stomach.

"Almost nobody likes it," Josh Ozersky wrote of hog maw in Esquire in 2014, a year before he died. "It's tough and tasteless, like the chitterlings to which it is attached."

Mr. Jordan would disagree. By the way, he cooks chitterlings, too.

These are the cuts that enslaved black people on plantations were allowed to keep when hogs were killed; after Emancipation, these were the cuts they might have had the money to afford and the skills to make into something memorable. Their healthy representation on the menu tells you that JuneBaby is not just a Southern restaurant but, specifically, a black Southern restaurant.

Of course, much of the huge edifice of Southern food was built by black farmers and black cooks: as enslaved people in plantation kitchens and in their own families' cabins; later, as domestic servants, hotel chefs, railroad cooks, restaurateurs and entrepreneurs. Mr. Jordan is interested in all of it, but he particularly wants to introduce customers to the food of his family.

He was raised in St. Petersburg, Fla., where the surrounding culture wasn't particularly Southern but his mother's table was. "The food she cooked was the only food she knew," Mr. Jordan said in a phone interview. "That's where I got my experience of fried fish, fried chicken, braised meats, offals, bread pudding."

JuneBaby's oxtails are a tribute to one of her mainstays. Mr. Jordan deepens the flavor of the beef by roasting it before braising. He focuses the broth by clarifying it with egg whites, as he would have done in culinary school and in kitchens where he's worked, such as the French Laundry in California and Per Se and Lincoln Ristorante in New York. But he doesn't try to prettify what the menu calls Momma Jordan's Oxtails, serving them whole, with cubes of turnip and rutabaga, the hunks of beef barely hanging onto tailbones whose wide, white wings flare out like propeller blades.

The chitterlings are essentially his paternal grandmother's recipe, stewed with onions, carrots and garlic. Instead of water, he might use some chicken stock, or the collagen-rich liquid thrown off by the pigs' ears. Rather than use a pot on the stove, he softens them in a pressure cooker. This both speeds the process by several hours and allows him to welcome the customers who line up each night waiting for the doors to open into a dining room that does not smell like intestines.

As variety meats go, intestines are not at the top of my list. Out of strong curiosity, I've eaten them packed into andouillettes in France, fried and kept under heat lamps in a gas station in Mississippi, and grilled over charcoal in the backyard of a Korean restaurant in Queens. I liked them best at JuneBaby.

"My grandmother's chitterlings were a thing I loved, but never talked about," Mr. Jordan said, a thought that will sound familiar to immigrants and other people whose families' food veers from the mainstream American diet. "You tell your friends as a kid you eat chitterlings, they run away from you."

Eventually he ran away from them, too, until he began to prepare a follow-up to his first restaurant as both chef and owner, Salare, down the street. The menu at Salare, he has said, expresses what he has learned in his career, centering on the Italian and French food he made in other people's restaurants. JuneBaby, though, "speaks on who I am as an individual soul and as an African-American male." And to do that he realized he would need to go back to "these ingredients that we don't want to talk about" and start to show them off.

Junebaby's chitterlings never come off the menu. They are not a huge revenue center for the restaurant but they may be, in a cultural sense, a loss leader.

The dining room has a welcoming, domestic atmosphere; somehow it always feels as if a warm breeze were blowing through the screens, even in winter with the windows shut.

For all the braised and simmered and stewed dishes, the kitchen glides easily into lighter territory. Vegetables keep their crunch. Bright green broccoli is tossed with grated Cheddar, almonds, apples and very delicate puffs of pork skin, all of them sharpened by preserved-lemon vinaigrette.

The buttermilk biscuits and raised dinner rolls, known here as Antebellum Wheat Buns, are made with a light, practiced hand under the direction of Margaryta Karagodina, the pastry chef. Red-flint cornbread, baked in an iron skillet, gets its minerally sweetness from sorghum.

Some of the desserts are slices of church-supper favorites, like a rich brick of bread pudding, interspersed with dark chocolate and soft apricots, sitting on crème anglaise. The Black Forest cake was the kind you rarely see anymore, three chocolate-cake layers frosted with cocoa-dusted whipped cream.

Alongside one of these, it's a good idea to let Mr. Jordan take you all the way back to the beginning of his career and have a flip. This is frozen fruit juice - pineapple the night I had it - in a paper cup, a tribute to the homemade Popsicles Mr. Jordan used to whip up out of powdered drink mix and sell when he was a boy in St. Petersburg. If the word flip doesn't ring a bell, one of its other names might: huckabuck, hucklebuck, frozen cup, freeze cup, cool cup.

If you're still in the dark, a definition can be found in the JuneBaby encyclopedia. This still-growing document, found on the restaurant's website, defines menu terms and concepts in Southern cuisine from Aunt Jemima to yams ("Most common African staple that fed enslaved Africans on board ships.").

The encyclopedia is another way JuneBaby drew me in. It nudged me to consider what I was eating. And it situated Mr. Jordan's family recipes in a centuries-long arc of American history. Many restaurants start with a chef's personal story. JuneBaby traces that story back to where it meets the country's.

Follow NYT Food on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.

JuneBaby

Atmosphere A well-designed modern dining room that evokes home cooking and the South with an enormous photograph of arching tree branches draped with Spanish moss. The jarred pickles and preserves on display are for sale. Service is personable, outgoing, helpful and, when asked, forthcoming about the traditions the menu represents.

Sound Vintage soul and R&B records play at background volume.

Recommended Dishes All breads; fried pig ear; broccoli with white Cheddar and apple; smoked carrots with collard greens and tahini; fried catfish and grits; Momma Jordan's Oxtails; Southern rice; collard greens; bread pudding; flips. Appetizers, $5 to $14; main courses, $19 to $22.

Drinks and Wine The excellent cocktails are named for Harlem Renaissance poems; the list of wines and beers is smart and manageable.

Price $$ (moderate)

Reservations Not accepted, except for groups of eight to 12 people.

Wheelchair Access Dining room and accessible restrooms are on the sidewalk level.

What the Stars Mean Ratings range from zero to four stars. Zero is poor, fair or satisfactory. One star, good. Two stars, very good. Three stars, excellent. Four stars, extraordinary.

This information was last updated:

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A Celebration of Black Southern Food, at JuneBaby in Seattle

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SEATTLE - As great restaurants will do, JuneBaby pulled me in from more than one direction. The first of course was the sheer pleasure of the cooking. (Without that, the others wouldn't matter.) The food is Southern, which I was primed to like before I walked through JuneBaby's Dutch doors in this city's Ravenna neighborhood.

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Rita

Spotify CEO announced Spotify trading to begin in April

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The music streaming service Spotify has told investors it can become profitable and fend off bigger rivals such as Apple and Amazon, as it announced its shares will begin trading on the New York stock exchange on 3 April.

Executives of the 12-year-old company said it had a user base of more than 100 million, with a higher percentage of paid subscribers than "freemium" listeners, who get music streamed free with ads, which is helping to drive more revenue to performers and copyright holders.

Spotify's co-founder and CEO, Daniel Ek, framed the launch as an attempt to save the music business from the effects of piracy as users increasingly use curated services like Spotify as a way not just to sample music but to discover it.

Spotify said subscriber growth gave the company a clear path to profitability as revenue grew 39% to €4.09bn ($5.03bn, £3.61bn) in 2017 from €2.95bn ($3.63bn, £2.6bn) in 2016.

But net financing costs of €855m ($1.05bn, £755m) pushed up operating losses to €378m ($465m, £334m) from €349m ($429m, £308m).

Ek made a direct pitch to retail investors during a public webcast that stood in place of a traditional closed-door "road show" typically used to woo institutional investors in initial public offerings (IPOs).

The Stockholm-based company's stock will be available to investors via an unusual direct listing without traditional underwriters.

Ek said he would not be ringing the bell or standing on the floor of the New York stock exchange giving interviews when Spotify's shares start trading.

"It's not about the pomp and circumstance," he said. "I think the traditional model of taking a company public isn't a good fit for us."

Because the company will not issue any new shares, it did not specify a listing price. Based on private transactions, it is valued at roughly $19bn, according to Reuters calculations.

Ek conceded that Spotify could have done a better job explaining what the company was trying to do with music streaming, after the company found itself harshly criticized for returning minimal sums to performers and copyright holders.

He said it was not Spotify's mission to disrupt the music industry or replace anyone. Ek cited statistics that showed music industry revenues had fallen 40% between 1999 and 2014 but rebounded somewhat between 2014 and 2016 as Spotify grew its user base.
Topics

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Spotify touts future profitability as it announces trading to begin in April

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The music streaming service Spotify has told investors it can become profitable and fend off bigger rivals such as Apple and Amazon, as it announced its shares will begin trading on the New York stock exchange on 3 April.

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Donald Trump's eldest son divorced with his wife

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The wife of Donald Trump Jr, the eldest son of US President Donald Trump, has filed for divorce, US media report.

They say Vanessa Trump is seeking an uncontested divorce in a New York court.

The couple, both 40, have been married since 2005. They have five children.

"After 12 years of marriage, we have decided to go our separate ways," the couple were quoted as saying by news site Page Six. "We ask for your privacy during this time."

The couple provided no further details.

An uncontested divorce means that custody over the children and assets are not disputed during legal proceedings.

Earlier this year, US media reported that the couple had marital problems, pointing out to Mr Trump Jr's frequent travel and his love of social media.

Trump Jr wife in hospital after opening white powder envelope

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The wife of Donald Trump Jr, the eldest son of US President Donald Trump, has filed for divorce, US media report. They say Vanessa Trump is seeking an uncontested divorce in a New York court. The couple, both 40, have been married since 2005. They have five children.

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Vanessa Haydon Trump, the wife of President Trump's oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., filed for divorce on Thursday afternoon in a Manhattan court.

Ms. Trump, 40, is seeking an uncontested divorce to end her 12-year marriage with the president's son. Mr. Trump, 40, the eldest of five children from President Trump's three marriages, met his wife, a former model, when his father introduced them at a 2003 fashion show. They married in 2005 at Mar-a-Lago, the family's club in Palm Beach, Fla. They have five children.

"After 12 years of marriage, we have decided to go our separate ways," the couple said in a joint statement. "We will always have tremendous respect for each other and our families. We have five beautiful children together and they remain our top priority. We ask for your privacy during this time."

The couple live in Midtown Manhattan during the week, and the family often spends weekends in the Catskills.

Mr. Trump and his brother Eric, 34, took over the management of the Trump Organization after their father was elected president. While his sister Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, moved to Washington and took senior jobs in the White House, Donald Trump Jr. chose to stay in New York after the election.

He has stayed in close contact with his father, often defending the Trump administration on Twitter and in interviews on Fox News, and he recently campaigned in Pennsylvania for the Republican candidate in a special election.

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Vanessa Trump Files for Divorce From Donald Trump Jr.

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Vanessa Haydon Trump, the wife of President Trump's oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., filed for divorce on Thursday afternoon in a Manhattan court. Ms. Trump, 40, is seeking an uncontested divorce to end her 12-year marriage with the president's son.

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A New Realationship Between Mathematics and Art (Esther)

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A New Realationship Between Mathematics and Art (Esther)

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Mathematics is far from being just a list of all the true statements we can discover about number. Mathematicians are storytellers. (Copy by the article)

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Irisa
United States senators introduced a bill to stop the dog come to die in an overhead compartment

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Fallout from the death of a French bulldog named Kokito continued for United Airlines on Thursday, as the airline explained how the dog had come to die in an overhead compartment and a United States senator introduced a bill to stop such a thing from ever happening again.

United's admission followed an uproar over the Monday death of Kokito, who was placed in the overhead bin shortly before a flight left Houston for New York.

Maggie Schmerin, a spokeswoman for United, said that the airline had spoken to the family, the flight crew and passengers who had been seated nearby. The flight attendant who placed the carrier in the overhead bin said she had not heard the owner tell her that the dog was in the carrier, Ms. Schmerin said. A witness and the owner said the dog had been barking before takeoff.

"As we stated, we take full responsibility and are deeply sorry for this tragic accident," Ms. Schmerin said. "We remain in contact with the family to express our condolences and offer support."

Senators John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, and Catherine Cortez Masto, Democrat of Nevada, introduced a bill on Thursday to prohibit airlines from storing animals in overhead compartments. The bill is called Welfare of Our Furry Friends Act, or WOOFF.

Today, I introduced the Welfare of Our Furry Friends Act, also known as WOOFF, w my colleague @SenCortezMasto. Our bill directs the @FAANews to create regulations to prohibit the storing of a live animal in any overhead compartment and establish civil fines for violations #WOOFF pic.twitter.com/U3nZqLNIaH
- John Kennedy (@SenJohnKennedy) March 15, 2018

Meanwhile, the Harris County District Attorney's Office, in Texas, told a local news outlet that its animal cruelty task force would conduct an investigation into the death. If there was one cause that Americans could unite behind, it was justice for Kokito.

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Fallout for United Airlines Continues After Death of Kokito the French Bulldog

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Fallout from the death of a French bulldog named Kokito continued for United Airlines on Thursday, as the airline explained how the dog had come to die in an overhead compartment and a United States senator introduced a bill to stop such a thing from ever happening again.

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About Stephen Hawking's death

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Stephen Hawking was a renowned scientist famed for his work on black holes and relativity.

He published several popular science books such as A Brief History of Time.

Professor Hawking was also a wheelchair user who lived with motor neurone disease from the age of 21.

Yes, he was an award-winning scientist, but a lot of the coverage after Prof Hawking's death has created a narrative of an "inspirational" figure who was "crippled" by his condition and "confined to a wheelchair".

As a disabled person, I've found this discourse troubling and somewhat regressive.

I'm tired of being labelled an 'inspiration'

Stephen Hawking's death has reminded me why I'm tired, as a disabled person and a wheelchair user, of being labelled an inspiration just for living my everyday life.

Prof Hawking was an extraordinary scientist and an incredibly intelligent human being.

However, many disabled people, myself included, would take issue with calling him an "inspiration" as this term is often used in popular society to belittle disabled people's experiences.

I am fine with my friends and family members calling me "inspirational". However, I get labelled it by random strangers, who hardly know me and just see the wheelchair and my condition (cerebral palsy, which means I use a wheelchair), not the person.

People with disabilities are often framed as either inspirational (say, a Paralympic athlete) or scroungers (people to be cared for or, worse, demonised) by the media and on television screens.

Our everyday experiences are neither heroic nor those of scroungers: it's just life as we know it.

Visionary physicist Stephen Hawking dies

Obituary: Stephen Hawking

More role models, please

Kids in the playground of my Merseyside primary school would compare me, probably the only young wheelchair user they had encountered, with the "genius" that was Stephen Hawking.

This was not an entirely fair comparison, I must say.

To me what this showed, even from a young age, was that there was a lack of "people like me", disabled people in the public spotlight, people I could aspire to be like.

I can think of four or five disabled people who were in the public spotlight when I was growing up early part of the last decade: David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary who is blind, Stephen Hawking, and two Paralympic athletes, Tanni Grey-Thompson and Ade Adepitan.

Prof Hawking showed that, despite public perceptions of what a disabled person can do, people with disabilities can achieve amazing things.

Even today, there are still too few disabled people out there in the public eye on a daily basis who are relatable for ordinary disabled people growing up.

If you're a sporty individual, there are Paralympic and disability sport stars. However disability representation on screen in the media and in society as a whole is low, despite the fact that disabled people make up almost one in five of the population, according to the UK government's Family Resources Survey.

All too often, they are categorised using able-bodied people's terminology as "inspiring" or "confined to a wheelchair" by illness or otherwise - rather than language based on their own experiences.

Listen to the latest episode of the BBC's Disability podcast, Ouch!

Watch your words (and your memes)

For me, the most troubling moment in the reaction to Prof Hawking's death was when an image of him standing out of his wheelchair went viral on social media.

What this image suggested was a rather damaging trope: the disabled person should always seek to not use a wheelchair, rather than the impairment being something positive to reflect and work with.

Society still seeks to create an image of a disabled person's life as pitiable or a burden on society. This can be incredibly damaging to a disabled person's mental health and their perception of themselves.

Class matters

One cannot ignore the role of class, race and gender privileges when it comes to disability as these are often intertwined.

Professor Hawking was first diagnosed with motor disease at the age of 21 and given a very short time to live.

However, prior to that, his experience had been one of an able-bodied upper middle-class male who studied at Oxford.

As my colleague Alex Taylor wrote for the New Statesman in 2014, Prof Hawking's social class and that he became disabled at 21 meant that he was afforded opportunities that would not have been given to a disabled person in his era who was born with their condition.

Often, the biggest barrier to a disabled person's advancement in society can be low expectations in the education system.

I grew up on Merseyside in northern England and went to a mainstream primary school and a comprehensive secondary school on a former council estate. I was sometimes advised to take "easier" subjects on account of my disability.

Fortunately, I persisted: I studied the subjects I wanted to. I went on to university and to get my dream job here at the BBC.

Only 44,250 of over 400,000 students declared a disability when starting their degree courses in 2015-16, the Higher Education Funding Council reported.

When you consider that there are 13.3m disabled people in the UK, that's a very low number.

Social class is still a significant contributor to determining the life chances of disabled people, something that Prof Hawking's death has brought home for me.

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How I saw Stephen Hawking's death as a disabled person

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Stephen Hawking was a renowned scientist famed for his work on black holes and relativity. He published several popular science books such as A Brief History of Time. Professor Hawking was also a wheelchair user who lived with motor neurone disease from the age of 21.

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Stephen Hawking's fame was founded on the research he did on general relativity and black holes. But he often stepped outside his own field of research, using his recognition to highlight what he saw as the great challenges and existential threats for humanity in coming decades. His pronouncements drove headlines in the media, which sometimes proved controversial.

Leaving Earth

Hawking was clearly troubled that we were putting all our eggs in one basket - that basket being Earth. For decades, Hawking had been calling for humans to begin the process of permanently settling other planets. It made news headlines again and again.

Hawking's rationale was that humankind would eventually fall victim to an extinction-level catastrophe - perhaps sooner rather than later. What worried him were so-called low-probability, high impact events - a large asteroid striking our planet is the classic example. But Hawking perceived a host of other potential threats: artificial intelligence, climate change, GM viruses and nuclear war to name a few.

In 2016, he told the BBC: "Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or 10,000 years.

Visionary physicist Stephen Hawking dies

Obituary: Stephen Hawking

A life in pictures

The book that made Hawking a star

He was confident that humans would spread out into the cosmos by that time (given the chance), but added: "We will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period."

Here, Hawking's views dovetailed with those of entrepreneur Elon Musk, another science superstar whose cogitations attract widespread attention. In 2013, Musk told a conference: "Either we spread Earth to other planets, or we risk going extinct. An extinction event is inevitable and we're increasingly doing ourselves in."

In line with his thoughts on the matter, Hawking also attached his name to a project researching technologies for interstellar travel - the Breakthrough Starshot initiative.

Rise of the machines?

Hawking recognised the great opportunities that arose from advances in artificial intelligence, but also warned about the dangers.

In 2014, he told the BBC that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race".

Hawking said the primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far had already proved very useful; indeed, the tech he used to communicate incorporated a basic form of AI. But Hawking feared the consequences of advanced forms of machine intelligence that could match or surpass humans.

Some academics thought the comments drew on outdated science fiction tropes. Others, such as Prof Bradley Love, from UCL, agreed there were risks: "Clever AI will create tremendous wealth for society, but will leave many people without jobs," he told The Conversation.

But he added: "If we are going to worry about the future of humanity we should focus on the real challenges, such as climate change and weapons of mass destruction rather than fanciful killer AI robots."

Tipping point

Hawking regarded global warming as one of the biggest threats to life on the planet. The physicist was particularly fearful of a so-called tipping point, where global warming would become irreversible.

"We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump's action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees, and raining sulphuric acid," he told BBC News.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also highlights the potential risk of hitting climate tipping points as temperatures increase - though it also emphasises the gaps in our knowledge.

However, Hawking was in plentiful company in regarding global warming as one of the great challenges of centuries to come.

Shhhh, keep it down

There's a whole field of science, known as Seti (The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) dedicated to listening for signals from intelligent beings elsewhere in the Universe. But Hawking cautioned against trying to actively hail down any alien civilisations that might be out there.

In 2010, he told the Discovery Channel that aliens might simply raid Earth for resources and then move on.

"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," he said.

"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."

At the time, Seth Shostak, from the Seti Institute in California, told the Guardian: "This is an unwarranted fear. If they're interested in resources, they have ways of finding rocky planets that don't depend on whether we broadcast or not. They could have found us a billion years ago."

But others saw the logic in Hawking's comments. Ian Stewart, a mathematician at Warwick University, commented: "Lots of people think that because they would be so wise and knowledgeable, they would be peaceful. I don't think you can assume that."

Controversial headlines

The media attention gave him an unprecedented platform. But some in the scientific community were occasionally less enthusiastic about the resulting headlines than the journalists who wrote them.

Indeed, while out covering events I have more than once been asked why the British media seemed to hang on Hawking's every word.

Prof Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, said: "He had robust common sense, and was ready to express forceful political opinions.

"However, a downside of his iconic status was that that his comments attracted exaggerated attention even on topics where he had no special expertise - for instance philosophy, or the dangers from aliens or from intelligent machines."

But many would also argue that, beyond individual statements or headlines, Hawking had a unique ability to connect with the public.

They would say that the "hype" this sometimes generated was an inevitable by-product of his household name status. Instead, we should focus on a greater good - his ability to bring science to the attention of people who might otherwise never have given it a second thought.

It's testament to his success as a communicator that the mourning for this champion of rational thinking extends far beyond the scientific community.

Follow Paul on Twitter.

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Hawking's warnings: What he predicted about the future

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Stephen Hawking's fame was founded on the research he did on general relativity and black holes. But he often stepped outside his own field of research, using his recognition to highlight what he saw as the great challenges and existential threats for humanity in coming decades.

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Sarita

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BREAKING: Revolutionary drone is driving leading drone manufacturers out of business

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When drones first hit the market, they cost hundreds, if not several thousands, of dollars. However, HDCube, a revolutionary new drone for beginners and professionals, is now available at not only a fraction of the size but a fraction of the cost as well.

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Women who stand out for justice

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In March 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks defied segregation laws by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin did exactly the same thing. Eclipsed by Parks, her act of defiance was largely ignored for many years. She herself didn't talk about it much, but she spoke recently to the BBC.
"There was segregation everywhere. The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn't even go into the same restaurants," Claudette Colvin says.

"I remember during Easter one year, I was to get a pair of black patent shoes but you could only get them from the white stores, so my mother drew the outline of my feet on a brown paper bag in order to get the closest size, because we weren't allowed to go in the store to try them on."

Going to a segregated school had one advantage, she found - her teachers gave her a good grounding in black history.

"We learned about negro spirituals and recited poems but my social studies teachers went into more detail," she says.

"They lectured us about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and we were taught about an opera singer called Marian Anderson who wasn't allowed to sing at Constitutional Hall just because she was black, so she sang at Lincoln Memorial instead."

Tubman and Truth

Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were both African Americans who sought the abolition of slavery

Tubman was well known for helping 300 fellow slaves escape slavery using the Underground Railroad

Truth was a passionate campaigner who fought for women's rights, best known for her speech Ain't I a Woman?

On 2 March 1955, Colvin and her friends finished their classes and were let out of school early.

"We walked downtown and my friends and I saw the bus and decided to get on, it was right across the road from Dr Martin Luther King's church," Colvin says.

"The white people were always seated at the front of the bus and the black people were seated at the back of the bus. The bus driver had the authority to assign the seats, so when more white passengers got on the bus, he asked for the seats."

The problem arose because all the seats on the bus were taken. Colvin and her friends were sitting in a row a little more than half way down the bus - two were on the right side of the bus and two on the left - and a white passenger was standing in the aisle between them.

The driver wanted all of them to move to the back and stand so that the white passenger could sit.

"He wanted me to give up my seat for a white person and I would have done it for an elderly person but this was a young white woman. Three of the students had got up reluctantly and I remained sitting next to the window," she says.

Under the twisted logic of segregation the white woman still couldn't sit down, as then white and black passengers would have been sharing a row of seats - and the whole point was that white passengers were meant to be closer to the front.

But Colvin told the driver she had paid her fare and that it was her constitutional right to remain where she was.

"Whenever people ask me: 'Why didn't you get up when the bus driver asked you?' I say it felt as though Harriet Tubman's hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth's hands were pushing me down on the other shoulder. I felt inspired by these women because my teacher taught us about them in so much detail," she says.

"I wasn't frightened but disappointed and angry because I knew I was sitting in the right seat."

The driver kept on going but stopped when he reached a junction where a police squad car was waiting. Two policemen boarded the bus and asked Colvin why she wouldn't give up her seat.

"I was more defiant and then they knocked my books out of my lap and one of them grabbed my arm. I don't know how I got off that bus but the other students said they manhandled me off the bus and put me in the squad car. But what I do remember is when they asked me to stick my arms out the window and that's when they handcuffed me," Colvin says.

My mother was proud but she was afraid something would happen to me

Instead of being taken to a juvenile detention centre, Colvin was taken to an adult jail and put in a small cell with nothing in it but a broken sink and a cot without a mattress.

"I was scared and it was really, really frightening, it was like those Western movies where they put the bandit in the jail cell and you could hear the keys. I can still vividly hear the click of those keys.

"I waited for about three hours until my mother arrived with my pastor to bail me out. My mother knew I was disappointed with the system and all the injustice we were receiving and she said to me: 'Well, Claudette, you finally did it.'"

After Colvin was released from prison, there were fears that her home would be attacked. Members of the community acted as lookouts, while Colvin's father sat up all night with a shotgun, in case the Ku Klux Klan turned up.

Find out more

Claudette Colvin spoke to Outlook on the BBC World Service

You can listen again here

Colvin was the first person to be arrested for challenging Montgomery's bus segregation policies, so her story made a few local papers - but nine months later, the same act of defiance by Rosa Parks was reported all over the world.

Like Colvin, Parks was commuting home and was seated in the "coloured section" of the bus. When the white seats were filled, the driver, J Fred Black, asked Parks and three others to give up their seats. Like Colvin, Parks refused, and was arrested and fined.

At the time, Parks was a seamstress in a local department store but was also a secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP).

Colvin knew her very well.

"I became very active in her youth group and we use to meet every Sunday afternoon at the Luther church," she says.

"Ms Parks was quiet and very gentle and very soft-spoken, but she would always say we should fight for our freedom."

Colvin says Parks had the right image to become the face of resistance to segregation because of her previous work with the NAACP. The organisation didn't want a teenager in the role, she says.

Another factor was that before long Colvin became pregnant.

"They said they didn't want to use a pregnant teenager because it would be controversial and the people would talk about the pregnancy more than the boycott," Colvin says.

On the night of Parks' arrest, the Women's Political Council (WPC), a group of black women working for civil rights, began circulating flyers calling for a boycott of the bus system. Soon afterwards, on 5 December, 40,000 African-American bus passengers boycotted the system and that afternoon, black leaders met to form the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), electing a young pastor, Martin Luther King Jr, as their president.

The boycott was very effective but the city still resisted complying with protesters' demands - an end to the policy preventing the hiring of black bus drivers and the introduction of first-come first-seated rule. To sustain the boycott, communities organised carpools and the Montgomery's African-American taxi drivers charged only 10 cents - the same price as bus fare - for fellow African Americans.

A year later, on 20 December 1956, the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation on the buses must end. The legal case turned on the testimony of four plaintiffs, one of whom was Claudette Colvin.

"The NAACP had come back to me and my mother said: 'Claudette, they must really need you, because they rejected you because you had a child out of wedlock,'" Colvin says.

"So I went and I testified about the system and I was saying that the system treated us unfairly and I used some of the language that they used when we got taken off the bus."

Colvin says that after Supreme Court made its decision, things slowly began to change. However, some white passengers still refused to sit near a black person.

When Colvin moved to New York many years later to become a nurse, she didn't tell many people about the part she played in the civil rights movement.

"New York is a completely different culture to Montgomery, Alabama. Most of the people didn't have problems with us sitting on the bus, most New Yorkers cared about economic problems. I didn't want to discuss it with them," she says.

If I had not made the first cry for freedom, there wouldn't have been a Rosa Parks

In 2009, the writer Phillip Hoose published a book that told her story in detail for the first time.

"He said he wanted the people to know about the 15-year-old, because really, if I had not made the first cry for freedom, there wouldn't have been a Rosa Parks, and after Rosa Parks, there wouldn't have been a Dr King.

"And I lived to see that change."

Listen to Claudette Colvin's interview on Outlook on the BBC World Service

More from the BBC

Fifty years have passed since campaigners overturned a ban on ethnic minorities working on buses in one British city. Today their boycott, modelled on the one in Montgomery, is largely forgotten - but it was a milestone in achieving equality.
What was behind the Bristol bus boycott?

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Before Rosa Parks, there was a 15-year-old girl

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In March 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks defied segregation laws by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin did exactly the same thing. Eclipsed by Parks, her act of defiance was largely ignored for many years.

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Story about some people saw marmaid or even male marmaid

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The mermaid has long swum in the sea of our collective imagination, appearing in stories ranging from fourth-century B.C. Chinese mythology to the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Most often she is a princess of the depths, with alabaster skin, a giant fin in place of legs and breasts covered by a mess of long, tangled hair. Her appeal, though, is not merely aesthetic. For centuries, men have braved the open waters, knowing full well they may never make it home, and the mermaid has served as either a kind of ballast in times of trouble, saving sailors from floods and deadly storms, or a figure of seduction, luring them to their deaths at the bottom of the ocean. Her passivity, as well as her beguiling exoticness, is an escape from whatever drudgery awaits these men back on land - the mermaid is a fantasy, yes, but also a way to explain the unexplainable in nature. The admiral on one of Christopher Columbus's expeditions once mistook a manatee, its silky gray curves moving gently through the Caribbean waters, for one.

Lately, though, it's the mermaid's male counterparts who've surfaced as objects of desire. In Guillermo del Toro's " The Shape of Water," Sally Hawkins plays a mute woman named Elisa who works as a cleaning lady at a government laboratory. She falls for a mysterious amphibian captured at sea - he's less merman, more creature of the lagoon, complete with webbed fingers and gills, but he enchants her nonetheless, gently swaying in his tank to the jazz music Elisa plays for him. The film echoes Rachel Ingalls's recently reissued 1982 novel " Mrs. Caliban," in which a lonely California housewife falls for a sexy frog man (" ... as for the rest of the body, he was exactly like a man - a well-built large man - except that he was a dark spotted green-brown in color and had no hair"). Finally, Melissa Broder's racy debut novel, " The Pisces " (out this May), tells of a young woman who, strolling Venice Beach one night, meets a handsome merman named Theo. "The tail starts below all that," he reassures her. Their love, as in all of these stories, is doomed, but it is passionate and refreshingly free of judgment.

Are real men these days so unwanted? In these interspecies romances, women aren't looking to be saved by convention (these frogs don't turn into princes when kissed). Their love also demonstrates a kind of compassion that feels profoundly absent right now. In light of #MeToo, such narratives of feminist reclamation force us to ask ourselves: Who is actually dangerous, and what is truly safe? What we fear most may not be these so-called monsters of the sea.

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The Latest Subject of Female Fantasies? Creatures From the Deep

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The mermaid has long swum in the sea of our collective imagination, appearing in stories ranging from fourth-century B.C. Chinese mythology to the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Most often she is a princess of the depths, with alabaster skin, a giant fin in place of legs and breasts covered by a mess of long, tangled hair.

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Imported product cost less than domestically grown equivalents, and competition from imports keeps prices down for domestic produce.

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The surge in imports, mostly from Latin America and Canada, flows from many other changes during the last 40 years, starting with improvements in roads, containerized shipping and storage technology. Horticulturists developed varieties and growing practices adapted to warmer climates - enabling, say, blueberries and blackberries to be grown in central Mexico.

Growth in American incomes spurred greater demand for fresh produce year-round. Immigrants brought tastes for the foods of their homelands, and in some cases (like avocados and mangoes) these tastes have became mainstream. Foreign growers took advantage of lower labor costs. International trade agreements reduced tariffs and other obstacles to imports, while many American farmers, facing regulatory hurdles at home, have responded by shifting production abroad, mainly to Mexico.

One crucial part of the story is little known: Over the past two decades, the United States Department of Agriculture has issued roughly 100 new rules allowing specific crops to be imported from certain countries - like peppers from Peru. Crops that previously would have not been approved because they might introduce invasive pests and diseases were allowed in through new "systems approaches" that manage those risks by combining methods like orchard inspections, sprays and bagging of fruits.

Many foreign crops have recently been approved for importation using these protocols, including Chinese apples and Colombian avocados. Some are still in the rule-making process (Chinese citrus, European apples), and others are under study (Brazilian citrus, Mexican guavas).

As a result, the proportion of the imported fresh fruit eaten in the United States rose to 53.1 percent in 2016, from 23 percent in 1975, according to the Agriculture Department's Economic Research Service. Fresh vegetable imports rose to 31.1 percent from 5.8 percent. (Still, the United States remains a net agricultural exporter, with grains, soybeans, meat and nuts accounting for most of the trade surplus.)

Greater availability has led to a huge increase in per-capita consumption of many crops, including mangoes (up 1,850 percent from 1975 to 2016), limes, avocados, grapes, asparagus, artichokes and squash. Yet consumption has fallen for other crops - like peaches, oranges, cabbages and celery - that are still primarily grown in America.

Imports vs. Homegrown

For consumers, the chief advantages of the import boom are the increased availability and variety of fresh produce, particularly in winter, when imported berries, grapes and stone fruit now compete with citrus and stored apples.

"It's easy to criticize food that comes from far away," Mr. Pollan said. "But if the question is whether this is good for your health or not, in general it is."

Many imports cost less than domestically grown equivalents, and competition from imports keeps prices down for domestic produce.

Imported produce is also sometimes fresher than the domestic equivalent. In spring, newly harvested Gala apples from New Zealand may be crunchier than the same variety from American orchards, which were picked the previous fall. And some imports are simply superb, like flavorful pink seedless muscat grapes from Chile, now in season.

But unlike imported furniture or washing machines, produce is perishable and may suffer from transport. It may be picked less ripe. Varieties may be selected for durability at the expense of flavor, and treatments mandated to kill pests (hot water for mangoes, cold temperatures for citrus) can degrade flavor or texture.

In many fruits, acidity drops over time, and off flavors develop; weeks-old cherries, for example, may still look fine but taste flat. Vegetables, too, can decline. Domestic asparagus, grown mostly in California, Michigan and Washington, tends to be plumper, juicier and more flavorful than the more fibrous and rubbery imports from Mexico and Peru.

It might seem logical that older produce is also less nutritious, and for some compounds such as vitamin C, levels do decline with time. But there does not appear to be any evidence that the overall nutrient content degrades significantly. From a public health standpoint, the benefits of increased availability and consumption of imported produce outweigh any such worries, nutritionists say.

It might also seem that imported fruits and vegetables are more likely than domestic produce to cause food-borne illness, but there's no evidence that this is so. "I don't think that produce grown outside the United States is less safe," said Bill Marler, a lawyer in Seattle who often represents consumers in food-borne illness cases.

Of some concern is a 2015 report from the Food and Drug Administration that found that 9.4 percent of imported fruit samples violated federal standards for pesticide residues, compared with 2.2 percent of domestic samples. (For vegetables, the figures were 9.7 percent for imported and 3.8 percent for domestic.) But that's probably not enough to justify avoiding imported produce.

"'Eat your veggies' is good advice no matter what," said Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. "The benefits of plant-based diets are better established than the harms of pesticides."

Reports of fraud from countries like China and Costa Rica have raised a concern: Is imported produce labeled organic as reliably free of pesticide residues as domestic equivalents?

No published scientific studies have directly addressed that topic. Jessica Shade, director of science programs at the Organic Center, a nonprofit organization that provides information about organic food and farming, said all certified organic produce, foreign or domestic, is subject to residue testing and on-site farm inspections by certifiers.

Even so, Mr. Pollan said, "I generally have more confidence in domestic than imported organic."

Then there are environmental issues: Because imported fruits and vegetables typically travel farther than domestic produce from farm to table, they cause greater harm from carbon emissions and pollution. That's especially true for produce arriving by air, which is likely to be fresher and cost more than produce arriving by ship.

But transport miles are just one component of environmental costs, and in some cases fruits and vegetables grown in a suitable climate overseas may require fewer resources for farming and be more generally sustainable than off-season domestic produce - cultivated, say, in heated greenhouses.

Drug cartels looking to launder money and diversify their operations control or extort some of the production and packing of certain export crops from Mexico (the largest exporter of produce to the United States), including avocados, mangoes and limes. Growers and militias have fought back, but the implications of cartel control for the quality, cost and healthfulness of the produce remain unclear.

The Harvest for Farmers

For American farmers, too, imports have had mixed consequences. The increased international trade in produce has benefited many of them (including growers of Northwestern apples and California citrus) but harmed others (producers of Florida tomatoes and California asparagus).

Most growers' organizations maintain that trade accords like the North American Free Trade Agreement have helped American produce farmers on balance.

"Nafta over all has been positive, and we oppose U.S. withdrawal from the agreement," said Ken Gilliland, director of international trade for Western Growers, which represents produce farmers in Arizona, California, Colorado and New Mexico. "Eliminating Nafta and implementing tariffs would have a negative impact on our members' ability to export."

Most of the advantage from exports, however, has gone to large growers.

"Clearly the larger shippers have benefited more from the globalization of produce," said David Runsten, policy director of the Community Alliance With Family Farmers, a California group that advocates for small farms. "Smaller organic produce growers in California are feeling the effects of increasing imports."

The Trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration is likely to worsen the shortage and high cost of labor, a serious threat for many American farmers. "The United States needs immigration reform and a stable labor force if it wants to continue to grow most of its own produce," Mr. Runsten said.

An onslaught of invasive pests and diseases such as spotted wing drosophila and citrus greening has cost farmers, and ultimately consumers, many billions of dollars for control measures and lost crops. Did any of those plagues arrive with commercially imported produce, or, as is generally thought, did they come in through other pathways such as smuggling of produce and plants by individuals?

"It is difficult to conclusively determine whether a pest introduction came through a regulated or unregulated route," Philip Berger, executive director of the Agriculture Department's Center for Plant Health Science and Technology, wrote in an email. "Compared to other possible pathways of introduction, U.S.D.A.-regulated imports of produce for food use have a lower risk of introducing new pests."

Increasingly, however, scientific studies have found that trade agreements and resulting increased produce shipments may have contributed to the movement of invasive species into the United States. So far no one has fully connected the dots, or estimated the costs for American farmers of pests and diseases attributable to imported produce.

"It's not clear that our investment in inspection resources has kept pace with the increase in trade," said Michael R. Springborn, an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis, who studies invasive species.

Will Produce Go the Way of Fish?

Whatever the drawbacks or advantages, imports are likely to continue growing. According to a recent Agriculture Department report, fresh produce imports will rise 45 percent from 2016 to 2027, implying that a decade from now, three-quarters of our fruits and almost half of our vegetables will be imported.

In other words, we could end up getting our produce as we do our fish - more than 80 percent of which is imported.

"If we can't grow the products here, we're going to have to import them," said Kathy Means, vice president of industry relations for the Produce Marketing Association, which represents both supermarkets and growers. "I'm not uncomfortable with that at all."

The federal government is focused on the economics. Jason Hafemeister, trade counsel to the secretary of agriculture, said in an interview that increased trade has generally benefited farmers and consumers. The Trump administration seeks to ensure a level playing field in trade for American farmers, he added, but wants to let consumers choose what matters to them in produce, whether price, freshness or origin.

Mr. Pollan, not surprisingly, does worry as imports climb. "I think it would be a tremendous loss if we weren't growing a significant percentage of our produce, for reasons having to do both with quality, and with the knowledge of the environment that farmers bring to a society," he said.

Consumers who agree can vote with their dollars by prizing local and domestic produce when available, and staying alert for decreased quality in less-fresh imports. The next decade or two will determine whether Americans can enjoy the advantages of an increasingly globalized supply without losing the very real benefits of domestic produce.

"Don't underestimate the ritual of eating seasonally, the pleasure one can have as fruit comes into the market," Mr. Pollan said.

Follow NYT Food on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.

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Most of America's Fruit Is Now Imported. Is That a Bad Thing?

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The surge in imports, mostly from Latin America and Canada, flows from many other changes during the last 40 years, starting with improvements in roads, containerized shipping and storage technology. Horticulturists developed varieties and growing practices adapted to warmer climates - enabling, say, blueberries and blackberries to be grown in central Mexico.

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Jocelyn

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Tipsy passengers and overflowing bins might be some of the most grating annoyances flight attendants deal with. But what can be even worse are the four S's: stealing, sneaking, swiping and switching seats.

While it's not always a problem, it can definitely cause headaches for cabin crew.

"Most flight attendants don't mind if passengers change seats," says Michael, a flight attendant for a major USA airline. Change seats in their own class, that is. Even then, there are some seats that are still off-limits.

This, of course, all depends on the airline - companies like Southwest Airlines and easyJet allow passengers to pick their seat once they start boarding. But in all other situations, passengers looking to sit somewhere else than they've been assigned can quickly cause chaos.

"It becomes a problem when a passenger wants to move to the exit row on the plane," Michael says, describing those seats that have extra legroom. "Most airlines make people pay upwards of 50 extra bucks to sit in those seats and charge them when they book the ticket. It's not fair for flight attendants to move or let people move to these seats when one or more paid extra to sit there. I personally don't let people sit there unless no one is sitting in the exit row."

Extra legroom aside: Desiring to sit next to friends, family or coworkers is understandable. But swapping seats isn't always that easy.

"Sometimes people will take it upon themselves to just have a seat where they want," Michael says. "It's easier for us flight attendants to have them sit in their assigned seats until the person that was supposed to be in the seat they want shows up. When they come and see someone in their seat, it causes a more hectic boarding process, and the passengers are now trying to work things out and it causes a mess."

But it's not always about wanting to sit next to your loved one. What about wanting to upgrade from coach to something more luxurious? If there is an empty seat and the upgrade list is empty, does that mean passengers from another section can relocate? Not so fast.

It's not fair for flight attendants to move or let people move to these seats when one or more paid extra to sit there.

Sandwiched between economy class and either business class or first class is another price range tier often called premium economy class. Sometimes when flying aboard large aircraft on major airlines, there are noticeably different perks of wide, plush seats that transform into comfortable lie-flat beds. Beyond comfort, other bonuses may include early check-in, wider seats, upgraded meals or snacks, and sometimes even gratis cocktails or comfort amenities like a sleep mask or toothbrush. In smaller aircraft that aren't flying long distances, the most common benefit - and for some travellers, the most obvious - is the added two to five inches of legroom. As always, the magic number depends upon the airline.

As for the dream of getting an upgrade? Most flight attendants will attest that first-class is usually full.

If there are any open seats, gate agents usually upgrade frequent flyers before boarding. Who gets the sought-after upgrades? Frequent flyers are the obvious first choice, followed by passengers who may have traded their seat for a voucher and upgrade on a later flight.

In addition to upgrades, there's a science behind the weight distribution. This important factor is called weight and balance, and depending upon the plane size (especially smaller regional carriers) passengers may be asked to relocate, at least for takeoff. We asked a pilot to explain:

As for the dream of getting an upgrade? Most flight attendants will attest that first-class is usually full.

"All aeroplanes operate in an envelope of stability. To continuously stay in this envelope, from takeoff to touchdown, all weight and its location have to be accounted for," says Darren Patterson, a pilot for a major US carrier. "If you were to attach a string to the top of the plane and dangle it, the center-of-gravity (CG) is the point where it is equally balanced. Just like two kids balancing on a see-saw," he explains.

Passengers who think their own weight doesn't make an impact on the flight may be surprised to learn otherwise.

"This CG continuously, yet slowly, moves throughout a flight as weight is shifted," says Patterson. "Even the movement of a single person walking in the aisle can be felt in the flight controls and very minor adjustments are made to keep the aircraft balanced. The largest loss of weight during any flight will be the fuel that is burned. So there are both a balanced starting point for takeoff and an ending point for landing. If both of these points are within that envelope you will always have a stable aeroplane."

Have you ever noticed the flight attendants counting passengers before departure? Other times, some aircraft have software that intuitively reads distributed weight and compute the numbers electronically for takeoff, while other flight crews have to do it manually.

The very best time to switch seats is online before getting to the airport.

If you've ever been on a puddle jumper and had the pilots relocate passengers to another seat, that means weight needs to be distributed for safety's sake. "The smaller the aeroplane, the more dramatic effect any shift in weight can have," Patterson explains. "On a large, wide body aeroplane, a single person can move 10 rows of seats and the effect on the balance is negligible. Have that same person move just a few rows on a regional plane or turboprop and the effects are far more dramatic; possibly even exceeding the limits of the envelope."

Thanks to the convenience of technology, some airlines allow passengers to upgrade on the spot with a swipe of a credit card once onboard. Yes, the same little handheld device flight attendants use to charge you for your double gin and tonic has the ability to upgrade passengers right there.

The very best time to switch seats is online before getting to the airport, followed by meeting the ticketing or gate agents prior to boarding. When there are empty seats, it's tempting to move, but there may be passengers still on their way to the aircraft. Once on the plane, the flight attendant is your final advocate - and we recommend you stick to the old adage, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. In other words, request nicely, and you might just score the seat of your dreams. At least in coach.
Beth Blair is a former flight attendant and a freelance writer. If you would like to comment on this or anything else you have seen on BBC Autos, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Autos, Future, Earth, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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Tipsy passengers and overflowing bins might be some of the most grating annoyances flight attendants deal with. But what can be even worse are the four S's: stealing, sneaking, swiping and switching seats. While it's not always a problem, it can definitely cause headaches for cabin crew.

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Slime-making kit

Slime! What could be more fun than playing with slime?

With the Cra-Z-Art Nickelodeon Slime Super Slimy, Wirecutter's top pick, you can make four big batches of the gooey stuff, whether that's clear slime, opaque slime or even slime that smells like cotton candy. (?!)

Drawing tablet

If art is your hobby of choice, Wirecutter's top drawing tablet for beginners is the Wacom Intuos Draw. It works on Windows and macOS with most popular art programs, and Wirecutter's reviewers found that of any tablet under $100, the Wacom offers the most precision and control.

MIDI keyboard

Keep your creative juices flowing with a MIDI keyboard - a compact, easy way to create music with your computer - like the Arturia MiniLab MkII, Wirecutter's top pick for beginners.

Drones

An old employer of mine would have a yearly raffle to get rid of all the items that were sent to us unsolicited over the past 12 months (with the proceeds going to charity, of course). One year I won a tiny, softball-size drone, the type of thing you'd buy for your 9-year-old niece or nephew, but a highly coveted prize at the raffle.

After I collected my prize, my co-workers and I gleefully raced back to our corner of the newsroom to test it out. I ripped through the packaging and charged the motor for a few minutes, then prepared for takeoff.

It was my very first drone flight, and just as expected, I crashed it into chairs, desks and the floor. An unsuccessful, turbulent ride, forever burned into my memory because as I was crashing my new toy around the offices of The Washington Post, the managing editor just happened to be passing by my section and caught the entire ordeal. He surveyed the scene of my disastrous flight path, let out a deep sigh, then looked me square in the eyes and said: "No."

Anyway, drones are really fun, and Wirecutter's favorite drone for beginners is the Parrot Swing.

(For the record, he has a great sense of humor and was joking around, but ... yeah.)

Calligraphy pens

Learn calligraphy with the Speedball Calligraphy Collector's Set.

Have a great week!

-Tim

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What We're Reading

* Your phone can combat depression.

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* Exercise, at any age, makes the heart younger.

* Balance your media diet.

* Learn how to respond when someone says " No. "

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5 Cheap(ish) Things That Will Keep You Entertained For Hours

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Slime-making kit Slime! What could be more fun than playing with slime? With the Cra-Z-Art Nickelodeon Slime Super Slimy, Wirecutter's top pick, you can make four big batches of the gooey stuff, whether that's clear slime, opaque slime or even slime that smells like cotton candy. (?!)

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http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43389031

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The World Health Organization is to launch a review into the potential risks of plastic in drinking water.

It will assess the latest research into the spread and impact of so-called microplastics - particles that are small enough to be ingested.

It comes after journalism organisation Orb Media found plastic particles in many major brands of bottled water.

There is no evidence that microplastics can undermine human health but the WHO wants to assess the state of knowledge.

Plastic particles found in bottled water

Bruce Gordon, coordinator of the WHO's global work on water and sanitation, told BBC News that the key question was whether a lifetime of eating or drinking particles of plastic could have an effect.

"When we think about the composition of the plastic, whether there might be toxins in it, to what extent they might carry harmful constituents, what actually the particles might do in the body - there's just not the research there to tell us.

"We normally have a 'safe' limit but to have a safe limit, to define that, we need to understand if these things are dangerous, and if they occur in water at concentrations that are dangerous."

'Shame and anger' at plastic pollution

Earth is becoming 'Planet Plastic'

Plastic pollution in seven charts

Mr Gordon said that he did not want to alarm anyone, and also emphasised that a far greater waterborne threat comes in countries where supplies can be contaminated with sewage.

But he said he recognised that people hearing about the presence of microplastics in their drinking water would turn to the WHO for advice.

"The public are obviously going to be concerned about whether this is going to make them sick in the short term and the long term."

The WHO initiative is partly in response to a study that screened more than 250 bottles of water from 11 different brands bought in nine countries - the largest investigation of its kind.

Read the full scientific report [PDF]

The tests were carried out at the State University of New York in Fredonia as part of a project involving original research and reporting by the US-based journalism organisation Orb Media.

Using a dye called Nile Red, which binds to free floating pieces of plastic, the university's Prof Sherri Mason found an average of 10 plastic particles per litre of water, each larger than the size of a human hair.

Smaller particles assumed to be plastic but not positively identified were found as well - an average of 314 per litre.

Of all the bottles tested, 17 were found to have no particles at all while many had counts ranging into the hundreds or even thousands, with big differences within brands and even the same pack of bottles.

We contacted the companies behind the brands and most responded, standing by the quality and safety of their products.

A few questioned why the study's results were so much higher than their own internal research or pointed out that there are no regulations on microplastics or agreed methods for testing for them.

The study comes on top of earlier investigations that have found microplastics in tap water, beer, sea salt and fish, and Prof Mason told me that researchers need to be able to answer the pressing question of whether microplastics can be harmful.

"What we do know is that some of these particles are big enough that, once ingested, they are probably excreted but along the way they can release chemicals that cause known human health impacts.

"Some of these particles are so incredibly small that they can actually make their way across the gastro-intestinal tract, across the lining and be carried throughout the body, and we don't know the implications of what that means on our various organs and tissues."

The UK's Food Standards Agency said it was unlikely that the levels of microplastic reported in the bottles of water could cause harm but it added that, "it would assess any emerging information concerning microplastics in food and drink".

For Dr Stephanie Wright of the King's College Centre for Environment and Health, the priority is to understand how much microplastic we are exposed to, and exactly what happens to it inside us.

Researchers have established that tiny particles of titanium dioxide can pass through the lining of the gut so the same might be possible with plastic, raising the question of where it would then end up.

Dr Wright told me: "The particles could stay within an immune cell in the gut lining, or be passed into our lymphatic system ending up in the lymph nodes, or there is a small potential for them to enter the blood stream and possibly accumulate in the liver.

"These are foreign hard particles which our body will obviously want to get rid of but it can't because plastic is not degradable so that will cause harm to the local tissue.

"But at the moment we don't know."

I suggested to Michael Walker, a consultant to the Office of the UK Government Chemist and founder board member of the Food Standards Agency, that the jury was out on whether microplastics could cause harm.

He replied: "The scientific literature says that not only is the jury not yet out on this question but the jury has not yet been convened on it."

The full Orb Media report can be found at www.OrbMedia.org
Follow David on Twitter

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The World Health Organization is to launch a review into the potential risks of plastic in drinking water. It will assess the latest research into the spread and impact of so-called microplastics - particles that are small enough to be ingested. It comes after journalism organisation Orb Media found plastic particles in many major brands of bottled water.

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Wow

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The assault was the most alarming in a string of cyberattacks on petrochemical plants in Saudi Arabia. In January 2017, computers went dark at the National Industrialization Company, Tasnee for short, which is one of the few privately owned Saudi petrochemical companies. Computers also crashed 15 miles away at Sadara Chemical Company, a joint venture between the oil and chemical giants Saudi Aramco and Dow Chemical.

Within minutes of the attack at Tasnee, the hard drives inside the company's computers were destroyed and their data wiped clean, replaced with an image of Alan Kurdi, the small Syrian child who drowned off the coast of Turkey during his family's attempt to flee that country's civil war.

The intent of the January attacks, Tasnee officials and researchers at the security company Symantec believe, was to inflict lasting damage on the petrochemical companies and send a political message. Recovery took months.

Energy experts said the August attack could have been an attempt to complicate Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's plans to encourage foreign and domestic private investment to diversify the Saudi economy and produce jobs for the country's growing youth population.

"Not only is it an attack on the private sector, which is being touted to help promote growth in the Saudi economy, but it is also focused on the petrochemical sector, which is a core part of the Saudi economy," said Amy Myers Jaffe, an expert on Middle East energy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Saudi Arabia has cut oil exports in recent years to support global oil prices, a strategy central to its efforts to make a potential public offering of shares of government-controlled Saudi Aramco more attractive to international investors. The kingdom has tried to compensate for its lost revenue by expanding its petrochemical and refining industry.

Some technical details of the attack in August have been previously reported, but this is the first time the earlier attacks on Tasnee and other Saudi petrochemical companies have been reported.

Security analysts at Mandiant, a division of the security firm FireEye, are still investigating what happened in August, with the help of several companies in the United States that investigate cyberattacks on industrial control systems.

A team at Schneider Electric, which made the industrial systems that were targeted, called Triconex safety controllers, is also looking into the attack, the people who spoke to The Times said. So are the National Security Agency, the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has been supporting research into forensic tools designed to assist hacking investigations.

All of the investigators believe the attack was most likely intended to cause an explosion that would have killed people. In the last few years, explosions at petrochemical plants in China and Mexico - though not triggered by hackers - have killed several employees, injured hundreds and forced evacuations of surrounding communities.

What worries investigators and intelligence analysts the most is that the attackers compromised Schneider's Triconex controllers, which keep equipment operating safely by performing tasks like regulating voltage, pressure and temperatures. Those controllers are used in about 18,000 plants around the world, including nuclear and water treatment facilities, oil and gas refineries, and chemical plants.

"If attackers developed a technique against Schneider equipment in Saudi Arabia, they could very well deploy the same technique here in the United States," said James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

The Triconex system was believed to be a "lock and key operation." In other words, the safety controllers could be tweaked or dismantled only with physical contact.

So how did the hackers get in? Investigators found an odd digital file in a computer at an engineering workstation that looked like a legitimate part of the Schneider controllers but was designed to sabotage the system. Investigators will not say how it got there, but they do not believe it was an inside job. This was the first time these systems were sabotaged remotely.

The only thing that prevented significant damage was a bug in the attackers' computer code that inadvertently shut down the plant's production systems.

Investigators believe that the hackers have probably fixed their mistake by now, and that it is only a matter of time before they deploy the same technique against another industrial control system. A different group could also use those tools for its own attack.

The August attack was also a significant step up from earlier attacks in Saudi Arabia. Starting on Nov. 17, 2016, computer screens at a number of Saudi government computers went dark and their hard drives were erased, according to researchers at Symantec, which investigated the attacks.

Two weeks later, the same attackers hit other Saudi targets with the same computer virus. On Jan. 23, 2017, they struck again, at Tasnee and other petrochemical firms, deploying a computer virus known as Shamoon, after a word embedded in its code.

The Shamoon virus first surfaced five years earlier at Saudi Aramco, wiping out tens of thousands of computers and replacing the data with a partial image of a burning American flag. Leon E. Panetta, the United States defense secretary at the time, said the attack could be a harbinger.

"An aggressor nation or extremist group could use these kinds of cyber tools to gain control of critical switches," he said.

Government officials and cybersecurity experts in Saudi Arabia and the United States attributed the 2012 Shamoon attack to Iranian hackers.

"Another attacker could have adopted that code" for the January 2017 attacks, said Vikram Thakur, a senior researcher at Symantec, "but our analysis showed the likelihood it was the same perpetrator was pretty high."

The attack in August was not a Shamoon attack. It was much more dangerous.

Investigators believe a nation-state was responsible because there was no obvious profit motive, even though the attack would have required significant financial resources. And the computer code had not been seen in any earlier assaults. Every hacking tool had been custom built.

The attackers not only had to figure out how to get into that system, they had to understand its design well enough to know the layout of the facility - what pipes went where and which valves to turn in order to trigger an explosion.

Investigators believe someone would have had to buy the same version of the Triconex safety system to figure out how it worked. The components, investigators said, could be purchased for $40,000 on eBay.

The attack has also shown the challenge of attributing with unquestionable evidence an attack to one country.

Cybersecurity experts said Iran, China, Russia the United States and Israel had the technical sophistication to launch such attacks. But most of those countries had no motivation to do so. China and Russia are increasingly making energy deals with Saudi Arabia, and Israel and the United States have moved to cooperate with the kingdom against Iran.

That leaves Iran, which experts said had a growing cyberspace military program, although the Iranian government has denied any involvement in cyberattacks.

Tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia have steadily escalated in recent years, and the conflict has drifted into cyberspace.

United States officials and security analysts blamed Iranian hackers for a spate of attacks on American banks in 2012 and more recent espionage attacks on the airline industry. Iranian hackers were blamed for the 2012 Aramco attack and are also the leading suspects in the more recent Shamoon attacks.

The August attack was far more sophisticated than any previous attack originating from Iran, Mr. Thakur of Symantec said, but there is a chance Iran could have improved its cyberwarfare abilities or worked with another country, like Russia or North Korea.

Tasnee said in an email that it had hired experts from Symantec and IBM to study the attack against it. The company said it had also "completely overhauled our security standards" and started using new tools to prevent cyberattacks.

"Being a global business," the company said, "we believe that cybersecurity is a concern wherever you are in the world."

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A Cyberattack in Saudi Arabia Had a Deadly Goal. Experts Fear Another Try.

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The assault was the most alarming in a string of cyberattacks on petrochemical plants in Saudi Arabia. In January 2017, computers went dark at the National Industrialization Company, Tasnee for short, which is one of the few privately owned Saudi petrochemical companies.

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A weird photographer who photographing the nightclubs in south of Chicago

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Before a career photographing the likes of Oprah and Steve Jobs for major US publications, the late Michael Abramson headed to Chicago's South Side and documented the wild parties of the funk and disco era

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Funky town: Chicago nightclubs in the 1970s - in pictures

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Before a career photographing the likes of Oprah and Steve Jobs for major US publications, the late Michael Abramson headed to Chicago's South Side and documented the wild parties of the funk and disco era

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Sarita

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Helena

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By: Dr Gareth Evans - Updated: 14 May 2020 | *Discuss

Listen to any discussion about supermarkets, food and the benefits of locally sourced produce and it won't be long before you hear the words "food miles." Although the expression was first coined back in the 1990s, over recent years those two words have really passed into the public consciousness and today, it seems, everyone is talking about them - but why, and what exactly are "food miles" anyway?

A Simple Idea

The idea behind the whole food miles thing is a very simple one - and the clue is, obviously, in the name; it is a way of expressing just how far the food we eat travels from the farm where it is first produced, before it ends up on our tables. In practice, however, it is not necessarily a straightforward thing to work out, since the journey from field to plate is not always a direct one. As a result, this distance may also include any number of other trips along the way, from farm to processor, from one processor to another, from processors to distribution centres, from there to the retailer and then finally to our homes. Worst of all, some of the journeys are very long indeed; in the fishing industry, for instance, there are tales of some of the fish caught in the North Sea travelling as far as China for processing, before making its way back to European tables.

Cutting the Carbon Cost

Transporting food around the UK represents nearly 25 per cent of all the trips made by heavy goods vehicles on the country's roads, according to DEFRA, and adds up to around a staggering 20 billion miles a year. That's an awful lot of fuel - and an equally big amount of carbon.

Just moving food up and down the country already represents huge distances travelled, but add all that's involved in bringing much of it into the UK by air, rail or ship in the first place, and it quickly becomes very clear that what we eat, eats up a lot of resources before ever we get our teeth anywhere near it. Cut the food miles, cut the carbon - or so the thinking goes; but is it really that simple?

Too Simple?

There are many who would say no - not because they don't care about the plight of the planet, but because they feel that there are just too many other factors that need to be taken into consideration when it comes to food.

For one thing, avoiding food produced in developing countries a long way away can have a catastrophic effect on the local economy and the people who may rely on export horticulture for their livelihoods. In some cases, it might even drive local farmers back to unsustainable agriculture methods to make ends meet, if their export market dwindles.

It is also important to think about the wider carbon costs involved in food production; locally produced food, it seems, may not automatically have the edge. A DEFRA study, for instance, concluded that it was less environmentally friendly to grow tomatoes in the UK than to import them from Spain, because heating British greenhouses used more energy than the transport. There are other examples too, which show that when you factor in things such as energy usage, fertilisers, feed and pesticides, the embodied energy balance does not always favour local produce.

It is a complex issue and perhaps looking at food just in terms of how far it has travelled risks missing a lot of other equally important things along the way; it's a good idea, but some people ask if it runs the danger of being just a bit too simple.

The Value of Food Miles

So where does all this leave the whole food miles idea? Is it a valuable guide to environmental impact, or an overly simplistic example of sound-bite science? The honest answer is that it's probably a bit of both; it mostly depends how you look at things. It is undoubtedly a good way to get people thinking about the whole idea of how and where our food is produced, and as a factor in the wider decision-making process over what you chose to buy and eat, "food miles" certainly have a part to play - but only a part. Clearly, there are other ethical and environmental concerns to consider too.

One of the hardest things that anyone who really cares about the planet has to realise is that the world isn't a simple place - it's really very complicated - and that can often make it very difficult to know for sure what to do for the best. The bottom line is, there are times when being eco-friendly isn't easy, but it's still worth trying, all the same!

You might also like...

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By: Dr Gareth Evans - Updated: 14 May 2020 | *Discuss Listen to any discussion about supermarkets, food and the benefits of locally sourced produce and it won't be long before you hear the words "food miles."

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I agree, it is a great stuff for us to realize what we make to  the earth. However, it's not the only thing for customers to make their decision.

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My favorite fruit is apples, and most of apples in Taiwan are come from other countries like Japan. Taiwanese apple is small and more expensive than others. I would like to choose Taiwanese fruit

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Discuss this food policy issue in the classroom

In 'Big Picture: Food and Diet', we considered the issue of food miles. Here are some questions you could ask your class to inspire discussion and some possible responses, as well as more potential solutions to the problem.

Some facts about food miles

An estimated 1 to 1.5 million livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa depend on the UK-based food chain.

£1 million per day in the UK is spent on fruit and vegetables from sub-Saharan Africa.

Food production and consumption is responsible for 18 per cent of total UK greenhouse gas emissions.

The average Kenyan is responsible for 0.3 tonnes of CO2 per year. The average Briton is responsible for 10.6 tonnes.

The energy used, factoring in aeroplane emissions, for Kenyan green beans is 12 times that for UK beans.

Source: Fair miles - recharting the food miles map
1. Can you think of three of the activities included within the 'food production and consumption' quoted in bullet point three?
Farming, fishing, fertilisers, pesticides, machinery production, commercial transportation, retail, shopping, preparation of food at home.
2. What factors do you think are responsible for the difference in the amount of CO₂ produced by an average Kenyan and an average Briton?
There are several things done by the average British citizen that contribute to the amount of CO ₂ produced, including road, rail and air travel.

Other factors include: leisure activities (everything from watching TV to visiting leisure centres), cooking, using fridges and freezers, consuming food and drink (and the packaging, transportation and processing that goes along with them), and heating our homes. The average Kenyan does not have access to electricity. Compared to the UK, the proportion of electricity that comes from renewable sources (eg hydropower and geothermal energy) is greater in Kenya.

Potential solution: Lovin' it local

A printable version of our 'Feast or famine?' playing cards can be found in the downloadable resources section at the bottom of this page.
More pros and cons
It's possible to support local farmers and farmers overseas.

Local produce from named farms and producers might increase consumers' understanding of how food ends up on our plates.

People would need to get used to eating seasonal food, rather than being able to buy all kinds of produce all year round. Local organic or free-range food can be more expensive than some less local equivalents. Would stocking more of this in shops drive up the prices of food for poorer people?

How 'local' is 'local'? Even if the food is farmed nearby, the farm will probably still use imported feed, seed, pesticides, fertiliser, etc, with the accompanying environmental impact. See the following links:

Fair miles booklet by IIED and Oxfam.

Search "supporting local food" on Google and see below to explore some more arguments around this.

The People's Supermarket is one example of a project to promote locally sourced and grown products.

Extension idea

How do the carbon footprints of different foodstuffs compare? Use the links below as a starting point to explore the carbon footprint of different foodstuffs, then answer the questions below.

1. How could you change your diet to reduce your individual carbon footprint?

2. What are some of the difficulties in calculating carbon footprints for different foodstuffs? Have a look at the following:

Downloadable resources

Discuss this food policy issue from 'Big Picture: Food and Diet' in the classroom

Suggestions for using the issue in the classroom

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'Big Picture' is a free and impartial educational resource for biology teachers and students exploring the innovations and implications of cutting-edge science. Our articles, videos, animations, infographics and lesson ideas set out to explain biomedical science and connect it with its ethical and social challenges.

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Tina
Stephen Hawkin spend his whole life in science

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A brief history of Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking spent his scientific life exploring some of the deepest questions a human caught in the Einsteinian opera of space and time could ask.

Although Einstein himself never really accepted it, his general theory of relativity predicted that if enough mass or energy were concentrated at one point, space would sag like mattress and eventually close itself off, creating a black hole from which nothing, not even light, could ever escape.

It would be Dr. Hawking's fate to explore these imagined monsters and ask what their presence portends for the universe, and for those of us who live inside it.

The universe had a beginning

​ In 1965, when Dr.Hawking was 23, the British mathematician Roger Penrose proved that if Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity, was correct there is a point of infinite density - a singularity - at the center of a black hole.

In 1970, building on work in Dr. Hawking's doctoral dissertation, he and Dr. Penrose show that there had to be a singularity at the beginning of time - in other words, a big bang.

That is to say, he showed that the universe had a beginning.

How black holes behave (and misbehave)

1970 Dr. Hawking shows that the area of a black hole's event horizon - a spherical surface marking the point of no return - can only increase, never decrease, as stuff falls into a black hole or it collides and merges with other black holes

1971 He suggests that mini black holes much smaller than stars created in the Big Bang could be peppering the universe.

1974 He shocks his colleagues and the world by showing that black holes will leak and explode when quantum effects - the weird laws that describe subatomic behavior - are taken into account.

1976 Dr. Hawking says exploding black holes add randomness and unpredictability to the universe, forever erasing information about what might have fallen into a black hole.

Quantum physicists object, saying the universe can't forget, initiating a 40-year argument about the fate of information.

Dr. Hawking concedes in 2004, but does not say how information is preserved in a black hole, and the argument continues to this day.

A Universe With No Boundaries

1982 Using a mathematical conceit called imaginary time, Dr. Hawking and James Hartle, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, propose a model of a self-contained universe that has no boundary in space or time, and thus no place or time when the laws of physics break down.

In their picture of cosmic history, space-time is like a globe of the Earth. Time starts at the North Pole and goes south as the universe gets fatter. Asking what came before the Big Bang, in this case, is like asking what is north of the North Pole, they said.

Moreover, just as nothing weird happens at the North Pole of the Earth, nothing strange happens to the laws of physics at time zero. Earth abides and so does physics, obviating the need for a creator.

'A Brief History of Time'

1988 Dr. Hawking publishes "A Brief History of Time." It stays on the London Times best-seller list for four years, starting a gold rush of science books by prominent scientists.

1991 Errol Morris directs a documentary of the same name about Dr. Hawking and his life.

2007 Dr. Hawking is briefly free of gravity at last on a "vomit comet" flight in Florida

An unrelenting curiosity

2012 Dr. Hawking stars in the opening of the Paralympic Games in London

2015 "The Theory of Everything," a movie based on a book by his ex-wife, Jane Wilde, wins an Oscar for Eddie Redmayne.

He can't make his mind up about aliens

2010 Dr. Hawking tells the Discovery Channel, "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans. We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."

2015 He presides over the announcement of Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

"In an infinite universe there must be other occurrences of life," he said. "Or do our lights wander a lifeless universe? Either way, there is no bigger question."

But he is sure about time travel. In 1991, he enunciated what he called the chronology protection conjecture, that will, as he put it, "keep the world safe for historians, It says that the laws of physics do not allow time machines.

Forget me not

In 2016, working with Andrew Strominger of Harvard and Malcolm Perry of Cambridge University, Dr. Hawking took a small step toward a solution of the infamous information paradox. He announced that information about what falls into a black hole might be preserved on the surface, or event horizon, of a black hole.

The universe will remember us, which is no small thing, he declared.

If the rules break down in black holes, they may be lost in other places as well, he warned. If information disappears into a gaping maw, the notion of a "past" itself may be in jeopardy - we couldn't even be sure of our own histories. Our memories could be illusions.

"It's the past that tells us who we are. Without it we lose our identity," he said.

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Stephen Hawking spent his scientific life exploring some of the deepest questions a human caught in the Einsteinian opera of space and time could ask. Although Einstein himself never really accepted it, his general theory of relativity predicted that if enough mass or energy were concentrated at one point, space would sag like mattress and eventually close itself off, creating a black hole from which nothing, not even light, could ever escape.

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Those plastic packages aren't good for the environment.
It is also pretty annoying because it cause more time when you eat.

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My favorite fruit is🥝🥝🥝 and most of it come from New ZealandI think I would stop eat Kiwi to help the planet because I won't be hungry without kiwi

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In our life,we’re useing too much pachage for food.Most of them are plastic.
Those plastic can’t

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Rita

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I support calculating carbon footage,it is important for people to know how much energy was wasted by exporting these food to Taiwan.

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Rita
I think because it would make many garbages when people finished eating .Also, may be some packs would make chemicals to the food

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I support calculating carbon footage. We can compare them and choose ones that are better

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Many food have been made too many packages,the salesmans want to make the products more delicate,and those packages will make lots of trashes.

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Eating food with lots of packaging will definetly create more garbage and harm the environment but it keeps the food fresh .

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Plastic bags are not health for the earth . Environmental issue is getting more and more important now ,many countries realized the problem now.

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Tina
More Packaging  will make more trash.Those packaging are some waste.