Eat with pleasure. Cook often. Care about food. On this blog I share my passion for every aspect of food by helping people make healthy, local, ethical food choices in every way that I can.
There isn’t a whole lot more to add in terms of commentary to the video below which is an animation surrounding the idea that bugs may be the animal protein of the future. I love how fat and gluttonous the Westerners are in this video. My favorite line, “Though Westerners may think it’s weird, insects are considered food in lots of other cultures.” Yea, well if you’ve been reading the blog as of late you will know that though it may be true that Westerners have an aversion insect cuisine, they do not apparently have an aversion to rat poop tacos.
Sally Davies an artist out of New York went out one day a bought a happy meal with the intention of of taking a series of pictures demonstrating what happens as food ages. She ran into a serious problem for the original intent of her project, the happy meal 6 months later (click for slide show) still has no appearance of aging, with the exception of some shrinkage. There are no signs of decay on anything, not the meat, bun or fries, after all there has to be something actually organic in a product to rot. Sally Davies has been quoted as saying, “And now, at 6 months old, the food is plastic to the touch and has an acrylic sheen to it.” Acrylic sheen meaning plastic. A food product is defined as a substance that can be used or prepared for use as food. Read here: created in labs and made to resemble things that we would eat. Such as the ‘burger’ in the above slide show. If the above food product does not have enough organic material to rot, how much nutrition can a human being possibly get from eating it, and why are we happily feeding it to our children and what on earth is it actually made of?
McDonald’s spokeswoman Danya Proud responded with this when asked if McDonald’s food is in fact not biodegradable.
“This is nothing more than an outlandish claim and is completely false.”
Really.
I’d like to respond with these clichés: The proof is the pudding and a picture is worth a thousand words.
Mayor Bloomberg and Paterson have petitioned the useless and toothless USDA to exclude sodas and sugary drinks from the list of items that can be purchased with food stamps in New York. The balance on this is the fact that many farmers markets now take food stamps, as well as some places in the country actually giving up to 30% back to the buyer as incentive to purchase healthy foods. It is a forgotten fact it seems that food products like sodas and candy were once considered treats to be consumed on rare occasions, not at every meal. This video graphically portrays the effect of just one soda a day, and I do mean graphically.
Jaime Oliver also addresses in the clip below which is a 20 minute talk he gave when he accepted the TED award this year, the effect of sugary drinks and just how much sugar is not only in sodas but also in the flavored milk that the schools serve to our children. He goes a step further and says that what we are allowing to be served to our kids is akin to child abuse. Though a lot of the statistics he quotes are depressing, his overall point and a salient point is that almost all of the weight related diseases, health care costs, shortening of life spans and general misery is completely and totally avoidable. For a country founded by people distrustful and disheartened by their original governments, actively seeking out a way to have more control over their day to day lives we have quite quickly, over the last 30 years, handed over almost total control over the very thing that fuels our life, food, to a handful of companies whose single goal is to make as much money as possible. We have handed over so much of our control that fewer and fewer of us actually even know how to cook as many as 1-5. Even though our regulatory bodies are so entangled with the companies they are ‘overseeing’ to the degree that ex-employees of said companies often run the USDA, we can still change the food system in this country. The companies don’t care how they make money, they are just as happy to sell us good food as they are to sell us crap as long as they sell it. It’s up to us. As Jaime Oliver says in this clip more than once, “You can care and still be commercial.”
I love that even though California wasn’t able to get the state-wide tax on plastic bags pushed through, individual cities have gone ahead and done it, charging as much as a nickel per bag. Read the full article over at the fantastic treehugger.
It is fascinating that in a country where we waste up to 40% of our food which as Jonathan Bloom recently said in an interview with CNN, is enough wasted food to fill the 90,000 seat Rosebowl stadium daily, that families are food insecure and food deserts are flourishing. The useless and toothless USDA is putting that number at 25%, and if we go with those surely lowballed numbers, that still translates into 360 million barrels of oil wasted a day.
The phrase food desert describes areas that have little or no access to foods needed to maintain a healthy diet (like fruits and vegetables) but are often served by plenty of fast food restaurants. The entire city of Detroit is considered such as area and has not one major food chain in residence. The remaining residents of this rapidly shrinking city have decided that living in a food desert is unacceptable and have taken on as a solution Urban Agriculture or Guerilla Gardening which is the practice of growing food anywhere one can from vacant lots to park grounds to abandoned front yards.
Infuse Detroit is one such group and they boast that they have grown over 2000 tons of food that they have given to food shelters and the like. Their gardens have no fences and they encourage the residents of Detroit to take from them what they need.
Another amazing group hard at the tilling and the growing is D-Town Farm. The intro to this clip is a little rough but well worth the watch.
Grown in Detroit is an amazing Co-op that not only has a farmers market for the farmers to sell their locally grown produce, but helps the farmers sell to restaurants and other retail spaces.
As Taja Sevelle, says in an interview with Ellen posted on the Urban Farming website, “They are turning Mo-Town into Grow-Town, which is pretty amazing.
Food Thinking 