Eat With Your Head

Credit: Drinknerd.

Half food. Half fun little toy. All good. This week I salute swedish fish, which I like to consume while reading magazines or watching a movie.  I think it’s the wax that makes them so delicious. Mmm!

Something that will take me a lifetime to understand — While they produce junk for international consumption, companies like Kraft and General Mills reserve their the use of chemical food dyes to Americans only:

Similarly, in the U.S., McDonald’s strawberry sundaes are colored with Red 40 but—amazing as it might sound—real strawberries in the U.K.

Fact: This bottle of coke from Indonesia has more real stuff in it than what you're drinking.

Also ever notice how Coca-cola is made with real sugar in other countries? What is it about us that doesn’t make us good enough for the real thing?

Wired has a super cool, elaborately designed feature on the future of food, including fun graphs on the dairy industry, world eating habits and how information technology can yield more effective farming practices. Less cool for me is this blind faith in genetically modified crops as the solution.

GM crops can pose many problems. They can contaminate other types of crops, for example. And with some companies patenting certain GM crops, they can lead to even more commercialization of food than is already occurring.

I think before we throw our hands in the air and our money into the lab, we should get some hope and ideas from stories like this one, which found an organic farm in Africa to not only “increase crop yields” but restore the health of the soil on which the food was grown.

Here’s an example from Chews Wise:

It’s clear that the world’s fish stocks are in trouble, but what’s the cost of decades of mismanagement? A new World Bank/FAO study puts the price tag at $50 billion dollars a year, or $2 trillion over the last three decades.

The study also offers a solution: catch shares, a fishing cooperative system that can help protect the livelihoods of farmers while also protecting fisheries from depletion.

A study finds the media devoted less than one percent of its article to examing the connection between the way we grow our food and climate change.

It has been way too long since I last blogged. But the good news is I started a new job that involves animals and global warming — both of which, of course, are intimately connected to food issues.

When things are messed up the way they are now, when we’re stuck down a path that seems terribly wrong, it’s time to think of some alternatives. Here’s a story of a former shrimp farmer who decided to switch his business from harvesting marine life to generating biofuels through algae.

While so far algae-based biofuel has not faced the same political scrutiny as food crop fuels, Wood’s decision presents an interesting situation where he’s choosing to produce algae instead of shrimp.

Maybe algae fuel will pose problems similar to the ethanol dilemna. But at least this farmer saw something that wasn’t working, and decided to create an alternative instead. So just a thought that we need to take solutions seriously to start building a future with cleaner air and better food (just read the article to find out what other countries do with their shrimp.)

After a too-long hiatus, here’s a relevant link I’m posting while watching the debate. This is an article on where Obama and McCain stand on food and farm policy.

Cooking by the numbers is one of those great tools that gets me excited about the web. Basically, you input all the food you have in your fridge, and it will generate recipe ideas for when you’re suffering from chef’s block.

At first I thought I saw this site as an apolitical but useful recommendation to pass on. But on second thought, I think this site can help you take political action through your food.

It offers a chance to use your personal resources (the food in your fridge) to create your own meal that is likely better for both your body and the world,rather than buying pre-prepared, mass market food (something I readily admit I wish I did less of.)

And it gives you inspiration to create your own magic rather than following other people’s recipes. Because as Chef Gusteau says, “Anyone can cook!”

“One of the greatest lies of our modern food culture is that it gives us choice.” A short, interesting interview with food activist Raj Patel on how the food part of so many foods has been removed, leaving things like Diet Coke Plus and Red Bull.

The next question: Why? Why? Why?