Michael Pollan's first food rule is simple:
Eat Food, which he considers to be a different thing than what he calls edible foodlike substances, or "highly processed concoctions designed by food scientists, consisting mostly of ingredients derived from corn and soy that no normal person keeps in the pantry, and contain chemical additives with which the human body has not been long acquainted."
1. Palm Oil
Many of those substances are bad for our health, bad for our planet and show up in really surprising places. One of the most blatant examples is palm oil, which is now found in just about everything; almost every product that screams "TRANSFAT FREE!" got that way by substituting palm oil for hydrogenated vegetable oil. the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute warns:
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The first Freakonomics book was a lot of fun; the second less so, as it sort of devolved into "if the scientific consensus and/or coast-hugging liberal elite are for it, we are against it" type of thing. Hence Freakonomics Watch; or perhaps it should be called James McWilliams Watch, since he appears to be the contributor to their blog with the most attitude about anything green. Now he is on about
The Persistence of the Primitive Food Movement, where "Bicycles are losing gears, runners are afoot in shoes designed to create a barefoot sensation (some are even running barefoot), and men are growing bushy Will Oldham-like beards."
Now it must be said that McWilliams is on to something with his coinage; there are many of us promoting natural ventilation and awnings instead of air conditioning, growing gardens and canning instead of buying processed food, neigbourhood stores instead of malls, bikes instead of cars. It is primitive, but it works, it costs a lot less and it uses a lot less energy. I am proud to be a New Primitivist. Alas, he then he gets back to his specialty, food.
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It's no secret that the world population of bluefin tuna is declining rapidly. The scientific and conservation communities have been calling for an
international trade ban for years and Mathew told us last year about a report stating that
Atlantic bluefin tuna could disappear in as little as three years if current catch levels were maintained.
To make matters more troubling for the tuna it now seems that Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi is looking to profit from an impending ban. ...
Image credit: Lifefactory
As a rule, I am not one of these greenies that gets overly excited about new reusable bottles. I have an old reusable bottle somewhere, and it occasionally gets used when I venture out of the house—but I've always been a little confused by the amount of attention paid to fancy reusable bottles and their cousins, the reusable tote. But with recent scandals over
BPA in old Sigg water bottles, and with
Nalgene finally going BPA free, many folks with old reusables may be looking for alternatives. So howabout going old-school? Glass may be back. ...
It is estimated that 40% of the food produced in America is wasted; it amounts to 1400 calories per person every day. According to the EPA, 31 million tons is thrown into landfills. Much of that produces methane as it rots; the gas is 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The UK website
Next Generation Food estimates that each tonne of food waste is equivalent to 4.2 tonnes of CO2. They conclude that if we simply stopped wasting food, it would be the equivalent of taking a quarter of all the cars in America off the road....
Images from Make Our Food Safe
A new study by a former FDA economist reports that foodborne illness costs America $ 152 Billion annually, the cost of 76 million cases of food related illness, 5,000 deaths, and 325,000 hospitalizations. The study,
Health-Related Costs from Foodborne Illness in the United States calls for new strong regulation:
"This report makes it clear that the gaps in our food-safety system are causing significant health and economic impacts," says Erik Olson, director of food and consumer product safety with the
Pew Health Group. "Especially in challenging economic times we cannot afford to waste billions of dollars fighting preventable diseases after it is too late. The Senate needs to act on this now and pass legislation that will improve protections for public health."...
Photo: Ecologic Brands
Some weeks ago we were sent a media release describing what was considered a "first-of-its-kind bottle." The
Ecologic Brands hybrid milk bottle is biodegradable, compostable and recyclable. We say hybrid because it is really two bottles in one. The outer shell is made from 100% recycled cardboard, using the same paper pulp methods that create egg cartons. This shell can be re-recycled, or composted. The milk itself is transported in a thin, flexible inner pouch, which is said to need 70% less plastic than normal plastic jugs.
We're told that Julie Corbett, founder of California-based Ecologic Brands was inspired by Canada's milk pouch that is dropped into a re-usable plastic carafe.* But we're still not convinced by that "first-of-its-kind bottle" claim. Have a look at the
GreenBottle milk jug out of the United Kingdom and you might find the similarities rather striking....
Saul's grassfed pastrami sandwich (left) vs. regular deli pastrami (right) Photo:
foodhoe.com
Saul's is part of only a handful of delis refashioning themselves as sustainably sourced eateries. Located in the gourmet ghetto of North Berkeley near Alice Water's Chez Panisse, one would presume its customers would be salivating for a sustainable deli, but not so. People are very attached to Saul's as a traditional, Jewish style deli. To proactively manage the potential unrest, Saul's deli owners decided to hold a "
referendum" and invited sustainability experts, farmers, consultants and their customers to discuss whether a deli can become sustainable. Having Michael Pollan's Seal of Approval HelpsIf you want your restaurant to have the imprimatur of sustainability, there's no better person to have on your side than
Michael Pollan, author of
The Omnivore's Dilemma and Food Rules, Berkeley resident and pastrami eating regular at Saul's. The February 9th referendum panel included Pollan, Saul's owners Karen Adelman and Peter Levitt, eco-consultant
Gil Friend, City Slicker Farmer Willow Rosenthal, and the moderator, restaurateur, and KCRW radio host Evan Kleiman....
The
Oil Drum post some interesting data on the energy input required to produce different kinds of foods; I threw them into bar chart form and it sure looks like
Graham Hill should be pitching the idea of a Weekday Vegan rather than a
Weekday Vegetarian; cheese is as high as meat....
We usually start with "A Picture is Worth", but in this case the thousand words are much more powerful.
Boingboing quotes designer
Justin Perricone: "This is a poster I designed using all of the ingredients in a Ham & Cheese Hot Pocket. First in a series."
It manages to break
Michael Pollan's food rules 1,2,3,5,6,7 and probably more. (are corn syrup solids the same as HFCS? that it gets 4 as well, and 7 straight)...
Image via Apartment Therapy
It's a tough job, trying to turn conventional wisdom on its head every day for the New York Times, but that doesn't stop the
Freakonomics team from trying, from spreading lousy advice and from not seeing the forest for the trees. Take the packaging of fruits and vegetables: James McWilliams writes that packaging makes food last longer and reduces food waste significantly, and that plastic is our friend. He also suggests that decaying food releases methane, whereas plastic in a landfill (or floating in the Pacific gyre) does not. He quotes the Independent, suggesting that discarding food produces three times the carbon dioxide as discarding food packaging.
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Image via About My Planet.
Guest blogger Sara Snow is green lifestyle expert and board member for Discovery's 24/7 future-forward network Planet Green.
Beginning back in 2006, beekeepers began reporting that their honeybees were disappearing, sometimes at rates as high as 90% of their hives. The sudden and unexpected loss became known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). The main symptom being no or few adult honeybees left in the hive, though the queen bee still lives and there are no signs of dead bees in or around the hive. It's like the bees have vanished.
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photo: J. Novak
As organic food has grown in popularity so too have the size of organic dairies and farms in this country. And in the last ten years questions have been raised about whether these large scale so-called organic dairies and farms have been abiding by all of the regulations which define them as organic in the first place. Some of the regulations themselves have been a bit gray and lacking in clarity. Issues have been specifically raised about whether enormous farms have been confining livestock excessively, without regard for the animals. Now the USDA has introduced tighter regulations to bring clarity to the amount of time organic livestock should actually be grazing....
A still from Agrarian Utopia
. Image via Extra Virgin.
The "heavenly home in the field" that is the Thai title of the experimental documentary/drama
Sawan Baan Naa is increasingly unattainable for the farmers depicted in the the movie, a film-festival success that
Variety calls "a promising narrative debut by young helmer Uruphong Raksasad [that] focuses on traditional lifestyles threatened by economic forces."...
Alessi has just launched a new product by Spanish designer
Martí Guixé; the
Seed Safe. It is a beautiful jar, dedicated to collect the seeds from vegetables and fruits we eat so that they can be planted instead of thrown away or composted. Guixé, who has a thing for seeds (see
the Plant Me Pet), believes that the Seed Safe is a must in every home, and since "seeds are in some way more valuable than money", planting those seeds can make you a rich person....
Youtube
That is the question University student Sheryl Ng tried to answer in her video
How Canadians Drink Milk (not an accurate title, since in Western Canada you can't get bagged milk.) We have covered the issue of milk in bags before; Collin wrote
Forget the Jugs; Milk Bags a Hit in Canada, UK last year. Much of the world gets their milk this way, from China to Argentina to Eastern Canada. It uses 75% less material, and the bags can be reused as sandwich bags So why does it stop at the American border?
The Star explained the history of it; It appears that you can blame (or credit) the metric system.
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Image Source:
Sifu Renka
Dear Pablo: I eat a lot of tofu as part of my vegetarian diet but it seems to me that this may conflict with my concerns for the environment. What is the carbon footprint of tofu?
Tofu is made from soybeans by curdling soy milk much like cheese is made from cow milk. The soybeans require very little, if any, irrigation and they "fix" about 1 pound of nitrogen in the soil per plant because they are legumes. The nitrogen put into the soil by the soybean plants reduces the amount of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer required for the crops, usually corn, that follow in the field's rotation of crops....
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on 03.18.10
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