The New Yorker drops a lengthy and sobering piece this week that looks at the depressing state of the world's food-supply system as detailed in four "second-wave" food-politics books.
Where "first wave" books (such as Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation) leave off at the ill effects of junk food, the new crop of books looks at how "the entire system of Western food production is in need of radical change."
If the idea of environmentally friendly lunches sounds a lot more appealing than sewing your own sandwich wrap, check out furoshiki, the Japanese "ecofriendly wrapping cloth." Traditionally used in Japan for wrapping gifts and money, furoshiki can easily be adapted for everyday use. In fact, the Japanese Ministry of the Environment
A piece in the New York Times today (part of the brilliant, groundbreaking Food Chain series that looks like it's being positioned for the Pulitzer Prize) explains in crystal-clear fashion how the high cost of fertilizer and its limited supply are contributing mightily to both the high cost of food in general and the devastating food shortages in many parts of the world.
Because certain kinds of fertilizer containing nitrogen create dead zones where rivers meet the sea and kill marine life, environmentalists are demanding changes that will limit the use of chemical fertilizer. Recently a United Nations panel recommended that farmers use increased crop rotation with legumes because legumes are natural nitrogen carriers.
Where do you eat in London for fish-and-chips made only from nonthreatened species from small-scale farmers, or for a meal where 85% of the ingredients are sourced from within the limits of the London Tube system? Check out Portfolio.com's report on London's environmentally-conscious restaurants.
Last July, we talked to Whole Foods Mid-Atlantic marketing director Sarah Kenney about the plastic bag ban. She said the average shopper still thinks in terms of paper-or-plastic, and it'll take time before grocery stores adjust this lifestyle norm. Well, it's been nine months and adjustments have happened. Today on Earth Day, Whole Foods officially yanks plastic from the normal duo-bag option, replacing it with an emphasis on canvas. Paper or canvas? Er, it'll take some getting used to.
For almost $30, about the price of a few essentials at the national grocery chain, you can get your own "Feed 100" reusable bag, exclusively created for Whole Foods. The 100% organic cotton and sustainable burlap bag—which niftily collapses into a zippered pouch—was designed by first-niece Lauren Bush.
Enjoy your favorite wine now; in 50 years it might not be here anymore. The Observer explains how global warming is affecting wine production. Grape-growing may be rendered impossible in some areas (southern Italy, Australia, California) while other areas where wine production was previously rare or impossible (Denmark, Sweden, Finland) may be able to grow grapes.
Does buying locally really help save the environment? Depending on how and when the produce is grown and stored, maybe not. The Observer investigates the myth of food miles, pointing out that judging the environmental impact of food solely on the distance the food traveled to get to your plate is too simplistic. Many factors go into calculating the amount of carbon emitted by a food that make it difficult to predict its carbon footprint. "There is only one way of being sure that you cut down on your carbon emissions when buying food: stop eating meat, milk, butter and cheese," said Tara Garnett of the Food Climate Research Network.
Dutch entomology professor Arnold van Huis wants you to eat bugs. From an interview with Ode magazine:
Why should we eat insects? While the world population is growing and our global wealth is advancing, meat consumption is rising dramatically. Currently, 70 percent of farmland is being used for meat production. If this trend continues, it will prove unsustainable. Moreover, livestock is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, including methane and nitrous oxide. Insects have a much lower environmental burden, while their nutritional value measures up to chicken or beef.
Van Huis concedes that bugs can take some getting used to but that they can be processed in ways that make them less recognizable, "just as a filet doesn't resemble any particular animal."
And hey: The interview comes complete with recipes. Banana Worm Bread, Mealworm Fried Rice, Rootworm Beetle Dip, and, my favorite, Ant Brood Tacos.
Don't flush just yet! The project drinkpeedrinkpeedrinkpee taking place at Eyebeam in New York City from March 13 to April 19 aims to raise awareness about the role your body (or more specifically, its waste) plays in the water system. To illustrate the potential for using properly treated urine—a sterile liquid—as a fertilizer for plants, Urine to Fertilizer DIY Kits will be available at the installation. How does the kit work?
Users will test their urine before the reaction. Then, they will add an enzyme, wait for their urine to hydrolyze, and then add Magnesium Chloride. A sediment will build up at the bottom of the jar. Using a filter, they will pour off and flush the liquid, leaving the fertilizer in the jar. They can add water and the seeds included in the kit to grow their own watercress hydroponically in the glass container used for the reaction.
For more information about treating urine to extract its nutrients, read this press release from EAWAG (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology). [via Cool Hunting]
I had just "powered off" my "electronic device" for landing on a recent flight and was placing my tray table "in the upright position" while glancing around anxiously for a cabin attendant to relieve me of my soda can and little plastic cup. When she came around with a trash bag, I offered the cup, but she asked for the can as well, placing everything in the same bag. I guess they don't recycle, I thought. What's up with that?!?
Salon's "Ask the Pilot" column (one of my favorite features on that site) tackles the issue in its latest installment.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust's Arctic Seed Vault just took the first delivery on seeds this week, and the New York Times has a beautiful slide show that tells the vault's tale in almost sci-fi-like visuals. The vault, which burrows 500 feet into the permafrost of a Norwegian island near the Arctic Circle, was created as a bulwark against the extinction of plant species.
Above, plumes of sediment stirred up by bottom-trawling fishing boats in the Gulf of Mexico—as seen from space. From MSNBC:
The technique, used all over the world, is a way to catch fish in deeper parts of the ocean with huge, deep nets, now that many near-shore fish populations have been virtually wiped out from over-fishing. Several studies have shown the significant impact that trawling has on ecosystems, killing corals, sponges, fish and other animals.
[via Neatorama]
For those of you following U.S. Congressional action on carbon footprints and food miles, the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on Energy Independence and Global Warming will hold a hearing on these issues today at 2 p.m. ET. Food for Thought: A Primer on the Climate Consequences of Food Choices will be streamed live at globalwarming.house.gov/home. Foodies might note that the executive director of the Chez Panisse Foundation will be among the experts taking part in the panel.
Mark Bittman had a remarkable piece in the New York Times yesterday about the true costs associated with all the meat we consume. According to Bittman, growing more industrialized meat, growing the feed the associated animals eat, and eating the resulting animal flesh, are collectively having dire consequences on the environment and our health. Bittman's story even gave a passionate, enthusiastic carnivore like me pause, and that's saying something. Bittman makes a compelling case for eating less meat, which of course people like Michael Pollan have been advocating for some time now.
I've been eating less meat on my diet, and I must admit I feel better. I don't miss the meat "hangover" that I used to get after polishing off a steak. Last night I went out for my birthday and brought home half the portion of delicious pork I was served at my favorite neighborhood restaurant.
Here are a couple of eye-opening lines from the story:
On weekdays, we try to bring you a short food video you can get through quickly during your busy day. But seeing how it's Saturday and you have more time, here's a longer, more weighty, but nevertheless interesting video in which Michael Pollan, Joan Dye Gussow, and Dan Barber talk about whether we can eat all the good stuff we love while still being green and healthy. Sit back and enjoy.
Generally speaking, insects are high in protein and essential fatty acids and low in cholesterol.... A 2004 U.N. report promoted insects as an environmentally friendly food source: low impact, consuming very little in the way of feed, easy to harvest, with no special measures required for their husbandry. ... Insects are arthropods, like lobster, crab and shrimp. They are plentiful, and account for over half of the known species on the planet. We spend billions of pounds trying to control or eradicate them, when we could just be eating them. So why don't we?
Get rid of those plastic bags without feeling guilty. I can finally get rid of some plastic bags I've accumulated without feeling guilty. The New York City Council passed a bill yesterday that will make large stores in the Big Apple collect and recycle the bags they pack groceries and other goods in. There will be bins in stores where you can bring your plastic bags, which can be from any store, of course.
International ocean environmental advocacy group Oceana has teamed up with Washington D.C.–based bakery Cakelove for their Adopt-A-Creature Campaign. With each marine creature adopted, you will receive an animal-shaped cookie cutter and a sugar cookie recipe from Cakelove, in addition to help protect coral reefs, fight global warming, protect sea creatures and eliminate unsustainable fishing.
As Michael Pollan discusses in his article in yesterday's New York Times, the rampant use of antibiotics in America's factory farms threatens to undermine its own efficacy. But why are antibiotics such a crucial piece of the industrial agriculture puzzle? Part of the reason is to fight off infections that tend to afflict animals confined to small spaces.
But that's not the whole story, at least with regard to ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats). In these livestock antibiotics are also used to fight infections that arise from abnormally high levels of E. coli, which in turn is a side-effect of the grain-based diet so common on factory farms. I was curious about this other side of antibiotics, so I asked a veterinarian friend of mine for some clarification.
Southern Foodways appears on Fridays as part of our collaboration with the Southern Foodways Alliance, an organization based in Oxford, Mississippi, that "documents and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South." Dig in!
In 2006, the Southern Foodways Alliance headed to Apalachicola, Florida, for a field trip. We were there for four days—tonging for oysters, gathering Tupelo honey, casting shrimp nets, worm grunting, and, of course, eating well.
As always, we did more than a bit of talking with the folks who have built their lives and livelihoods in the Apalachicola Bay.
These people tell stories of the days when schools of mullet were thick in the water and when Tupelo honey was a local find, not a Hollywood star. More than fish tales and folklore, these are the stories of the men and women who have depended on the Apalachicola Bay for generations. They are stories from Florida’s Forgotten Coast.
Financial Times contributor Sarah Murray weighs in on the "food miles" diet. Murray, the author of Moveable Feasts: From Ancient Rome to the 21st Century, the Incredible Journeys of the Food We Eat, writes:
The "food miles" diet is a neat concept. The trouble is, the distance food is transported is not necessarily an accurate measure of its environmental impact.
Her analysis is noteworthy for its clearheadedness.
Image from iStockphoto.com
A terrific, provocative op-ed piece in the New York Times today argues that hunters were locavores before anyone had coined the term. Writer Steven Rinella, author of The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine, is an avid hunter and, apparently, a serious environmentalist as well:
While many people will never give up their opposition to killing Bambi, others may change their minds when they realize that destroying a deer's reproductive abilities or relying on the automobile for population control is really no less wasteful than tossing fresh produce into a landfill....
Hunters need to push a new public image based on deeper traditions: we are stewards of the land, hunting on ground that we know and love, collecting indigenous, environmentally sustainable food for ourselves and our families.
Andrew Martin in his Feed column in the New York Times business section questions just how green the locavore movement is.
What spurred his question? Researchers at UC Davis are conducting studies trying to determine the actual carbon footprint of local food.
Isn't this kind of a silly academic exercise? We don't need a study to tell us that driving to a farmers' market every day in a gas-guzzling SUV to buy a pound of local produce leaves a heavy carbon footprint and is bad for the environment.
Photo from dslrninja on Flickr.com
When I order takeout from my local Thai restaurant, the amount of nonrecyclable plastic that is used to carry all that delicious food to me is absolutely out of hand. There are the thick, round plastic containers (which are no doubt a huge improvement in quality over their aluminum predecessors) as well as plasticware I simply don't need, plastic soup and rice containers, and, of course, the plastic bag that the whole thing was delivered in. And then when I think about the fact that all this plastic gets used only once, the real guilt begins to set in.
The New York Times had a blog post the other day that was brilliantly titled Five Easy Ways to Go Organic. Throw "easy" and "organic" into the same title and you're bound to elicit a response. If they had thrown "cheap" in there as well, they would have seen thousands of comments on the blog posts instead of hundreds.
The gist of the post, which was mostly gleaned from an interview with Alan Greene, author of Raising Baby Green:
Switching to organic is tough for many families who don’t want to pay higher prices or give up their favorite foods. But by choosing organic versions of just a few foods that you eat often, you can increase the percentage of organic food in your diet without big changes to your shopping cart or your spending.
The key is to be strategic in your organic purchases. Opting for organic produce, for instance, doesn’t necessarily have a big impact, depending on what you eat. According to the Environmental Working Group, commercially-farmed fruits and vegetables vary in their levels of pesticide residue. Some vegetables, like broccoli, asparagus and onions, as well as foods with peels, such as avocados, bananas and oranges, have relatively low levels compared to other fruits and vegetables.
So how do you make your organic choices count? The author suggests five organic foods that are readily available, consumed frequently, and not prohibitively expensive.
But were the five easy ways easy and right?
Slate magazine compares the environmental effects of vegetarianism and omnivorism. Eating some meat may make better use of environmental resources than eschewing meat all together, but overall people are eating more meat than what nature can efficiently supply.
The PB&J Campaign aims to raise awareness about the positive environmental impact one could make by simply eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead of a meat-based alternative. For instance, you could save 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, 280 gallons of water, and 12 to 50 square feet of land by choosing a PBJ instead of a hamburger. If you're not a fan of peanut butter and jelly, there are plenty of other tasty environmentally friendly alternatives that can help slow global warming, reduce water waste, and save land.
A few weeks ago, the website Blackle.com crossed my path and I was instantly fascinated, but I'm going to spare you a click and give you the long and short of it: It's Google search, but it's not sponsored by Google, and its black. Fine, go. Click, I know you're going to, anyway.
Despite being a black-clad, large sunglasses-sporting stereotypical New Yorker, it wasn't the site's chi-chi and fashionable affect that drew me in, but that it was built on the notion that the color black uses less energy on the web, and even eensy amounts of savings—especially when you consider the scale of a web behemoth such as Google—add up.
Sadly, this premise that black uses less energy than white on the web has been disproven, mocked and shamed by countless writers evidently smarter than me, but I suppose in hindsight, the theory was kind of ridiculous.
But the principle behind it was not. I don't mean to break into a kind of kumbaya-style "all we are saay-iiing"–type song here, but the tiniest adjustments to energy consumption have been proven to make a difference. And in few rooms do we use energy as blindly as we do in the kitchen. Thus, I have scoured the web for small modifications you can make in your kitchen and in you cooking that have the potential to make a big difference in our overall dent on this lush, green land.
Better yet, I'm hopefully leaning on sources that will not disprove, mock, or shame you later on for your good intentions. It's a start, right? Start cookin' green after the jump.
Washingtonians are no strangers to canvas bags. Plenty of lobbyists tote eco-chic "Save the Turtles" or "Barack the Vote" sacks on the Metro. But remembering to pack that extra one for the grocery run after work is a whole 'nother story.
Annapolis, our Chesapeake Bay-side neighbors to the east, have spearheaded a plastic bag ban, following the lead of cities such as San Francisco, which enacted a ban in March, and Oakland in June. A similar switch in D.C. might take some time. "It's a huge lifestyle change, and a bunch of people just won't remember to bring their own," said Whole Foods Mid-Atlantic marketing director Sarah Kenney. Our minds still think in terms of paper-or-plastic, she said on the phone yesterday, and that's OK.
But the Mid-Atlantic region is trying to change that, beginning this fall with air fresheners that say "Remember Your Reusable Bags." Like a Post-it note, this reminder—the first will be grape-scented—should rouse that last-minute mental synapse in the car. Sniff sniff. Oh yeah. Snag the bloody bag! And maybe—just maybe—by the time the freshener's scent runs out, the snagging part will come naturally. It's Whole Foods's take on operant conditioning, and like rats, we need that environmental trigger.
How do you see this glass? If you're Martin Lagod, managing director and co-founder of Firelake Capital Management, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, it's half empty and the tap you wanna top it off with is running dry:
According to data collected from NASA and the World Health Organization, 4 billion people will face water shortages by 2050. Already in China, water levels in the Yellow River -- a source that supplies more than 150 million people -- are down 33 percent from the average. In China's cities, wastewater pollution and inadequate treatment facilities have contaminated the water consumed by more than half the population. Of its 669 major cities, 440 face moderate to severe water shortages. The Chinese government—desperately seeking solutions—calls the water shortage a social, environmental and economic crisis.
And it's not just China, Lagod says.
Large supermarkets and pharmacies will have to use cornstarch-based plastic bags or recyclable paper ones:
Under the legislation, which passed 10-1 in the first of two votes, large markets and pharmacies will have the option of using compostable bags made of corn starch or bags made of recyclable paper. San Francisco will join a number of countries, such as Ireland, that already have outlawed plastic bags or have levied a tax on them. Final passage of the legislation is expected at the [Board of Supervisors] next scheduled meeting, and the mayor is expected to sign it.
The pink plastic bags seen around Chinatown are safe for now.
According to a survey from the Waste and Resources Action Programme, Britons throw out a third of all food purchased, about 6.7m tons of food a year: "Wrap figures suggest that around 20% of British climate change emissions are related to the production, processing, transportation and storage of food. The main reasons for having excess food were that more was bought than needed, that fridges were too warm and that many products with a short shelf life were not eaten prior to their best before date. Children refusing to eat food or pestering their parents to buy unwanted items while shopping further contributed to waste, Wrap said, along with informal or unplanned eating patterns." Appalling, but I can't imagine things are much better in the rest of the developed world—anyone know where I can find statistics?
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