Eat With Your Head

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?

This is unfortunate. Tyson was found to inject antibiotics into chickens it later sold as antibiotic-free:

But the USDA found that in addition to the non-human antibiotic, Tyson was also using a drug commonly given to people.

And the USDA and other federal agencies are not exactly known for their strict standards, anyway. Labels could be a safe and easy way to figure out what you’re putting in your body, but they often amount to little more than marketing strategies.

In a victory for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Whole Foods is set to pay an extra penny per pound of tomatoes to improve steadily declining wages for tomato farmworkers in Florida. As Grist says:

After years of intense pressure involving consumer boycotts and considerable legal backlash on the part of industry, several industrial-food giants have agreed to the raise in recent years: Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and most reluctantly, Burger King. (As Eric Schlosser showed last year, by pinching a penny per pound of tomatoes, BK was saving itself $250,000 a year — a rounding error in terms of annual profits and a fraction of annual executive pay.)

I’ve been reading about this issue for a while…Clearly CIW knows how to campaign. Otherwise, why do tomato pickers get so much more attention from corporations and the media than any number of farmworkers?

This story not only offers some good news but shows the direct impact good advocates can have.

The nearly universal food price increases are not doing much good for the organic movement. This article argues how the increase in oil prices has led to an increase in food prices, too. Buying locally can remove some of our dependence on oil when we eat, since local farmers don’t need to drive as much to transport food, and are more likely to skip the “petroleum-based fertilizers” as well.

Here’s a ranking of fruits and vegetables, based on the amount of pesticides used, helpful to let you know when buying organic will truly make a difference or not. Peaches top the list (but are also very much in season at farmer’s markets!)