food
cmonforton | February 1, 2011The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production (LCSP) is known for challenging the status quo. Its scientists and policy analysts refuse to accept we have to live in a world where parents are worried about toxic toys, or companies feel forced to choose between earning profits and protecting the environment. Leave it to LCSP researchers to describe six cases of systemic worker health and safety failures, yet manage to identify small successes or opportunities to create them. That's the Lowell way:
"...infuse hope and opportunity into a system that may appear severely broken."
In "Lessons…
sastyk | January 31, 2011Stuart Staniford has a terrific piece that offers a little visual clarity about food, energy, unemployment and the Riots in the Middle East and North Africa:
Tunisia is a minnow in the global oil market, Egypt slightly more important. Algeria, however, matters a lot as its oil production is probably close to total demonstrated OPEC spare capacity. Thus serious social instability in Algeria would have major effects on global oil prices. If instability spread to bigger oil producers than that (eg Kuwait or UAE), the effects could be very dramatic.
Presumably, the regimes in those countries…
aardvarchaeology | January 29, 2011Dismember a chicken and boil it in pan #1 until tender.
Boil it with onion + carrot + garlic clove, all split, and bay leaf + salt.
In pan #2, melt a few tablespoons of butter and whisk 0.4 dl of wheat flour into it.
Add 5 dl of the chicken broth from pan #1, strained, a little at a time, while whisking.
Add the shredded zest of a lemon and half of its juice.
Add salt and pepper to taste and a dash of turmeric for colour.
When the sauce has boiled for a while and thickened well, take it off the heat and whisk an egg yolk into it.
Meanwhile, cook rice and some vegetables.
The easiest way to…
cagapakis | January 23, 2011Industrial food production separates us from our food, increasing the distance from living thing to food product. As factories continue to import corn and export almost everything we eat, writers like Michael Pollan urge us to eat "real" food, and projects like the Slow Food movement have gained over 100,000 members who strive to preserve traditional and regional ways of growing and cooking food. At the same time, a growing number of young contemporary artists also explore the distance between us and what we eat by bringing secretions of the human body into food production.
Human secretions…
sastyk | January 10, 2011Pha Lo has a wonderful piece at Salon on the ways that his family's history of locavorism was a source of shame and conflict for them, because it fit so badly into the American diet. He echoes a story I hear over and over again, both from immigrants and from Americans from traditional agricultural communities - we were embarassed about our diet, made ashamed or even punished for eating real food, told what we were eating was gross. He writes about his local, organic, sustainable diet:
I remember watching grown-ups lose their identities and self-worth, slip into depression and cycles of…
lborkowski | January 7, 2011Earlier this week, riots erupted over food prices in several Algerian cities - according to Reuters, prices for flour and salad oil there have doubled over the past few months. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization's food price index is now slightly higher than it was during the last global food crisis in 2008, though the New York Times' William Neuman points out that the absence of inflation adjustments makes a direct comparison tricky. The overall situation isn't as bad as it was in 2008, but whether the world tips over the edge into another full-blown crisis depends largely on upcoming…
lborkowski | December 27, 2010Liz and Celeste are on vacation, so we're re-posting some content from our old site.
By Liz Borkowski, originally posted 11/3/09
New York-based Fairbank Farms is recalling more than 500,000 pounds of ground beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. Gardiner Harris reports in the New York Times that two people - one from New Hampshire and one from New York - have died after eating the ground beef suspected of contamination, and more than two dozen people have fallen ill. [Note: This is a re-post from 2009, so don't go running to look for this beef in your fridge. Up-to-date…
mikethemadbiologist | December 10, 2010Leave it to conservatives to actually conduct the War on Christmas (Got Scrooge?). I give you National Review editor Kate O'Beirne on the problem of hunger (italics mine):
O'BEIRNE: And then the title of our gathering is so crucial; "Less of Washington and More of Ourselves". The federal school lunch program and now breakfast program and I guess in Washington DC, dinner program are pretty close to being sacred cows... broad bipartisan support. And if we're going to ask more of ourselves, my question is what poor excuse for a parent can't rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana? I just don't…
sastyk | December 9, 2010It is claiming I don't have permission to embed it (I do, actually), so you can see the video here.
I gave this talk back at the beginning of October, in my conference as a member of the ASPO-USA Board. This was only the second time that ASPO has had a significant talk about the connection between food and agriculture, so instead of trying to make claims about how this may play out, I focused on what we already know to be true. As you all probably know, I think that we've barely begun to plumb the depths of the connections between food and energy. I will say, if I ever give a talk there…
lborkowski | December 7, 2010As I mentioned yesterday, Sharon Astyk of Casaubon's Book and I are spending this week focusing on urbanization issues. Sharon is a farmer and has been writing for a long time about sustainable food production, particularly as it relates to climate change and a dwindling supply of fossil fuels. In her post yesterday, she linked to some of her past writing about urban issues, and the theme that ties them together is rural-urban collaboration. Cities can't grow enough food to feed all their residents, and rural areas need the durable goods that cities produce, so a reciprocal relationship is…
cmonforton | November 30, 2010The US Senate passed today the Food Safety Modernization Act on a by a 73 to 25 vote. More than a dozen Republican Senators broke ranks with their leadership and voted in favor of the bill: Alexander (TN), Brown (MA), Burr (NC), Collins (ME), Enzi (WY), Grassley (IA), Gregg (NH), Johanns (NE), Kirk (IL), LeMieux (FL), Lugar (IN), Murkowski (AK), Snowe (ME), Vitter (LA), and Voinovich (OH). Supporters of the bill are calling it a milestone that will provide better protection for consumers from foodborne illness (here, here, here.)
Section 103 of the food safety bill (S.510), will require…
cmonforton | November 22, 2010Turkey Day is on the way. Workers employed in U.S. turkey processing plants are asking for your help to secure safer working conditions. These workers handle about 30 turkeys per minute---30 turkeys per minute---on the production line. The faster the production line moves, the faster the workers have to move to make their cuts. If they can't keep up, they won't be working there for long. Over a 10-hour shift, workers have to make more than 20,000 cuts on the turkey carcasses---20,000 cuts. At that pace, it's easy to imagine the opportunities for contamination of the meat----the…
sastyk | November 22, 2010I was about to write something about the FAO's recent warning about the food situation, but it turns out I don't have to, since Liz Borkowski at the Pump Handle beat me to it - great link to Raj Patel's piece in the Guardian as well. Definitely worth a read!
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has released a new Food Outlook, and the news isn't great.
Global wheat and rice production have both suffered setbacks this year as Russia has suffered from drought and Pakistan from floods. Poor cassava harvests in Asia are also a concern, given that cassava is the staple food of nearly a…
lborkowski | November 19, 2010The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has released a new Food Outlook, and the news isn't great.
Global wheat and rice production have both suffered setbacks this year as Russia has suffered from drought and Pakistan from floods. Poor cassava harvests in Asia are also a concern, given that cassava is the staple food of nearly a billion people. Tight supply has caused prices to rise for these and other food commodities.
The fear is that we'll face another global food crisis like the one that caused riots in several countries in 2008. The FAO suggests it's not time to panic yet, but a little…
pronald | November 14, 2010In the recent debate on sustainable agriculture, I noted that "The likelihood of pollen from GE cotton causing harm to the environment is about as likely as a poodle escaping into the wild."
Amidst the avalanche of comments, noone rebutted the peer-reviewed data indicating that biotechnology has already contributed to enhancing the sustainability of our farms as measured by environmental and socio-economic benefits. But there were several people who were concerned about the poodle.
Let me explain.
The farms here in the great Central Valley of California supply 50% of the nation's fruits and…
pronald | November 11, 2010One more day to vote in the , which asks the question "Is Biotechnology compatible with sustainable agriculture?"
PZ Myers answers the question this way: "this is weird: agriculture is biotechnology, and just breaking ground with a sharp stick and throwing some seeds in is an example of an 'unnatural' human practice"
He also publishes the opposition's "top secret email", which has some gobbledy-gook about how farmers are turning against GE crops (um, name one?) and contaminating nature (massive reductions in insecticide use on BT cotton fields and enhanced biodiversity is destruction?). PZ…
drorzel | November 10, 2010Having posted not one but two snarky political entries in recent days, I feel like I owe the Internet a couple of ResearchBlogging posts to make up for it. It's the last week of classes here, though, which means I have a lot of frantic work to do. Thus, a frivolous poll inspired by the cinnamon rolls I had with breakfast:
The sugary white stuff on top of baked goods is:survey software
While this will almost certainly get more votes for "I will explain in a comment" than comments-- that seems to be an Internet tradition-- it's still a classical poll, and thus you must choose one and only one…
sastyk | November 10, 2010Local food is elitist! This trumpets from one paper or another, revealing that despite the growing preoccupation with good food, ultimately, it is just another white soccer Mom phenomenon. Working class people (who strangely, the paper and the author rarely seem to care about otherwise) can't afford an organic chicken or a gallon of organic milk! Ordinary people don't have time to make soup. Regular folk don't care about that stuff - that's for brie-sniffing folks, just the next rich people's food fad.
I can think of a few hundred refutations of this claim, of course. There are all of my…
sastyk | November 8, 2010The oft-discussed 10,000 mile Caesar Salad, used to illustrate the degree to which our food system is drenched in fossil fuels, really is only a piker when it comes to the spaces that food can make you cover.
10K miles by airplane, refrigerator truck, etc... is nothing compared to the distances in time and place you can cover in seconds with food - consider, for example the space in time and distance a single evocative bite can offer you. Home you are transported to your mother's table in Detroit from your home in Lyon with a single bite. Back you travel, 20 years and 5,000 miles to the…
sastyk | November 4, 2010Note: A cold, wet day in November seems like as good a day as any to talk about owning a wood cookstove, re-running a piece I first wrote in 2007. When people come to my house, they are often a little disappointed to see that it looks pretty much like other houses. But the wood cookstove really is different than what most people know - even folks who heat with wood usually don't cook with it as well. And while heating and cooking with wood aren't appropriate in every environment, it is appropriate to mine, and maybe to more people than have given it thought before. I also know it is one…