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Diet Food Health Capitalism

the edible vegetable begins with the sprouts and does not end until the leaves, vines, tubers, shoots and seeds have given their all.

If home cooks reconsidered what should go into the pot, and what into the trash, what would they find? What new flavors might emerge, what old techniques? Pre-industrial cooks, for whom thrift was a necessity as well as a virtue, once knew many ways to put the entire garden to work. Fried green tomatoes and pickled watermelon rind are examples of dishes that preserved a bumper crop before rot set in.

“Some people these days are so unfamiliar with vegetables in their natural state, they don’t even know that a broccoli stalk is just as edible as the florets,” said Julia Wylie, an organic farmer in Watsonville, Calif. The produce she grows at Mariquita Farm is served at Bay Area restaurants like Delfina, Zuni Cafe and Chez Panisse.

Food Ethics Waste

You wouldn’t want to eat something capable of basic learning and memory, would you? But that’s the real problem: plants aren’t really capable of any of those things. Only a crackpot (or an editor of the International Journal of Parapsychology, it seems) would suggest that peas actually talk or learn or remember in the sense that a human, or even a puppy, talks and learns and remembers (and, to be fair, Marder seems to admit as much). Chemical signaling in plants may resemble those activities in some important ways, and so we can use the terms “talk” and “remember” and “learn” to draw analogies with familiar concepts. The danger in drawing such analogies, and the fallacy in Marder’s moral argument, lies in overextending those analogies.

Every analogy has a breaking point. Life is like a box of chocolates in that it’s far more expensive for some people when Valentine’s Day rolls around; however, life is unlikely to have originated in Kansas City, Missouri. Similarly, animal communication and plant chemical signaling have in common the basic properties of signaling systems; however, those similarities only extend so far, and necessarily end where the animal nervous system comes into play.

Vegan Plants Food Ethics

Cochineal has been used by humans for hundreds of years, and provides an important source of cash for a lot of rural Central and South American people.  There is some evidence the culture and sale of cochineal leads to more independence and higher female literacy in Mexico.  It's entirely consistent with Starbucks' policy to sustainably source their products to use a natural product like cochineal.

There is a change.org petition condemming Starbucks for using insect dyes; I'm tempted to start one to praise them for it!  The market for cochineal has been declining steadily, as more Western people discover what it is and freak the fuck out about insects in their food. That means less income traveling to our southern neighbors in the Americas.

I am a bit puzzled that people who willingly eat something called a Soy Strawberry Frappuccino, or [*shudder*] a Starbucks "Red Velvet Whoopie Moon Pie", are concerned about a tiny amount of insect extract. The reality is that anytime you eat processed food–including coffee and chocolate–you ARE eating insects. They may not be on the label, but parts of them are in there. 

Food Insect Vegan Ethics Starbucks

a pea plant subjected to drought conditions communicated its stress to other such plants, with which it shared its soil. In other words, through the roots, it relayed to its neighbors the biochemical message about the onset of drought, prompting them to react as though they, too, were in a similar predicament.

Curiously, having received the signal, plants not directly affected by this particular environmental stress factor were better able to withstand adverse conditions when they actually occurred. This means that the recipients of biochemical communication could draw on their “memories” — information stored at the cellular level — to activate appropriate defenses and adaptive responses when the need arose.

Plants Ethics Food Communications Diet

A paper in this week’s issue of Nature reinforces the argument that a hybrid path in agriculture — incorporating both industrial-style production and organic practices where they make sense — gives the best chance of feeding some 9 billion people by midcentury with the fewest regrets.

Food Naturalistic Fallacy Organic Food Pesticide

The movement began in the winter of 2003 when Ms. Bonnivard, a member of a small far-right nationalist movement called the Identity Bloc, began serving hot soup to the homeless. At first, she said, the group used pork simply because it was an inexpensive traditional ingredient for hearty French soup. But after the political significance of serving pork dawned on them and others, it quickly became the focus of their work.

Made with smoked bacon, pigs' ears, pigs' feet and pigs' tails together with assorted vegetables and sausages, the soup is meant to make a political statement: "Help our own before others."

The "others," Ms. Bonnivard explained, are non-European immigrants who she and her colleagues on the far right say are sopping up scarce resources that ought to be used for descendants of the Continent's original inhabitants. In other words, the soup is meant to exclude those who do not eat pork — for the most part, Muslims and Jews.

"Other communities don't hesitate to help their own, so why can't we?" she asked, noting that Europe's Islamic charities serve halal food to disadvantaged Muslims and that its Jewish charities operate kosher soup kitchens.

Food Religion

the world’s half-billion small farms account for 60% of global agriculture production and provide up to 80% of the food supply in developing countries. Together, they manage vast areas of our planet, including 80% of the farmland in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
Can we really count on these farmers, many of them desperately poor, to take a leading role in addressing the twin challenges of food security and environmental sustainability? Can they produce more food while protecting the natural environment?

Food Poverty Farming Climate Change Development

Every day, smallholder farmers in developing countries confront the consequences of climate change.  They are often the very first to fall prey to fickle global markets or extreme weather events.

Yet smallholders cannot be ignored when it comes to climate-change solutions: the world’s half-billion small farms account for 60% of global agriculture production and provide up to 80% of the food supply in developing countries. Together, they manage vast areas of our planet, including 80% of the farmland in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.

Can we really count on these farmers, many of them desperately poor, to take a leading role in addressing the twin challenges of food security and environmental sustainability? Can they produce more food while protecting the natural environment?

Farming Climate Change Food

distinction between treatment and exploitation, I suspect, is also at the root of some differences among vegetarians themselves: vegans, for instance, make the argument that eating eggs and dairy products is unethical on the grounds that they are derived by exploiting animals. Presumably, ovo-lacto-vegetarians do not find this argument entirely convincing. Indeed, the latter seem to be drawing the line at treatment, not use: they will eat cheese, milk and eggs as long as the animals are not subjected to artificial hormonal treatments and are given a reasonably healthy diet and life style (e.g., free ranging chicken and cows).

The treatment-exploitation divide, then, also helps us make sense of why some vegetarians think it is okay to use, say, horses for races, or a range of animals for transportation of people or goods. They may see these activities as relatively benign as long as the animals are well treated, as each party (again, asymmetrically) gets something out of the symbiosis. For instance, horse racing may be acceptable on the condition that the horses are well taken care of, while a rodeo is could well be unacceptable because the animals are usually abused before and during the performance. (I do admit that there are plenty of grey areas here, but I think the general picture holds.)

Exploitation Treatment Animal Animal Rights Autonomy Ethics Diet Food

Scientists in the Netherlands hoping to create a more efficient alternative to rearing animals have grown small pieces of beef muscle in a laboratory.

These strips will be mixed with blood and artificially grown fat to produce a hamburger by the autumn.

The stem cells in this particular experiment were harvested from by-products of slaughtered animals but in the future, scientists say, they could be taken from a live animal through biopsy.

One usually assumes the main motivation for vegetarianism - aside from those who practise for religious reasons - is about the welfare of animals. The typical vegetarian forswears meat because animals are killed to get it.

So if the meat does not come from dead animals would there be an ethical problem in eating it if it one day lands on supermarket shelves?

Vegetarianism Food Stem Cells Ethics Morality

Every year, innumerable packaged-food products worldwide are withheld or recalled from the market due to the presence of “all natural” contaminants like insect parts, toxic molds, bacteria, and viruses. Because farming takes place outdoors and in dirt, such contamination is a fact of life. Over the centuries, the main culprit in mass food poisoning often has been contamination of unprocessed crops by fungal toxins – a risk that is exacerbated when insects attack food crops, opening wounds that allow fungi (molds) to get a foothold.

Food Technology Naturalistic Fallacy GM Food

Hawker fare is the fare of immigrants - like our past, and our current.

Food Singapore Hawker

Food Animal Plants Diet

if you want to minimise animal suffering and promote more sustainable agriculture, adopting a vegetarian diet might be the worst possible thing you could do.

Sustainability Environment Food Vegetarianism

Innovation means change, and change is not always welcomed amongst the public and their represenative. But the perversity of the innovation economy is such that resisting innovation does not mean that things will stay the same. Innovation has consequences and so too does aversion to innovation.

Innovation Change Genetic Food GM Food Society Politics Regulation

As the Indian biotechnologist, C S Prakash, has correctly observed: "The only thing sustainable about organic farming in the developing world is that it sustains poverty and malnutrition."

Organic Farming Sustainability Food Science Myth

it just annoys me when people talk about the fattening foods they eat and are like “I’M SUCH A FAT KID. I’M AN OBESE PERSON.” Because it’s like, hi, you’re not. You’re the opposite. Imagine if someone who was morbidly obese did tweet about their ice cream sundae and say something like, “I’m SUCH a fat kid.” There would be crickets on the Internet. A tumbleweed would run through their Twitter. For someone who’s fat, their relationship with food is more private and shame-based. But if you’re thin, you can flaunt it without judgement.

I guess, at the end of the day, I’m just bewildered by skinny people eating like they’re Kirstie Alley (circa last year) at an all-you-can-eat ice cream bar. WTF? Maybe I’m just jealous though. Either way, just stop calling yourself fat and posting pics of you devouring cake please. Some of us can’t have our cake and Twitpic it too!

Twitter Social Media Fat Politics Food

Singapore-based chef Andre Chiang is on a mission to save a rain forest and he’s planning to start by serving what an orangutan eats—wild ferns, orchid leaves and durian flowers, among other plants.

The Taiwan-born, French-trained chef’s concept is simple: Diners who tuck into his “Orangutan Salad,” he hopes, will also think about saving the creature behind the dish’s name.

“If they (orangutans) don’t have a rain forest, they don’t have these ingredients, and they have nothing to eat,” he said.

Food Nature Conservation Deforestation

Amid heightened concern about global climate change, it has become almost conventional wisdom that we must return to our agricultural roots in order to contain the carbon footprint of our food by shortening the distance it travels from farm to fork, and by reducing the quantity of carbon-intensive chemicals applied to our mono-cropped fields.
But implicit in the argument that local farming is better for the environment than industrial agriculture is an assumption that a “relocalized” food system can be just as efficient as today’s modern farming. That assumption is simply wrong. Today’s high crop yields and low costs reflect gains from specialization and trade, as well as scale and scope economies that would be forsaken under the food system that locavores endorse.

Food Climate Change Capitalism Carbon Emission Comparative Advantage Economics