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Teach A Man to Fish…

By Brian Filed in Food Tagged with , , , April 13th, 2010 @ 12:38 pm

Good Magazine posted this excellent infographic last week that should help people decide what fish to buy at the market to promote sustainable fishing. (You’ll definitely need to visit the link to see the full-sized chart, which is huge) The data comes from the Monterey Aquarium in California, which tracks fishing stocks nationally.

It breaks down the information according to geographical regions, but there’s not a lot of difference between most of them other than some obvious differences between Pacific and Atlantic species. Even a quick glance will tell you, though, that most of the popular varieties — cod, haddock, flounder — are nowhere to be found, since those are the most overfished species. Oddly, the Northeast chart lists “spiny lobster” but not “Maine lobster”, even though the lobster population here isn’t particularly stressed and is actually on its way to a second year of overabundance, but maybe that’s just a mistake on the part of the infographic makers. I also notice that swordfish is back on the “okay to eat” list after having been the focus of an embargo by some restaurant chefs a couple of years ago.

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Call Something Paradise, Kiss It Goodbye

By Brian Filed in Food, Links, News Tagged with , , , , March 19th, 2010 @ 11:12 am

There has been great concern that overfishing of bluefin tuna has decimated the stock to the brink of extinction. Bluefin tuna is one of the most popular fish used in sushi making; maguro is a standard item on any sushi menu, and the more prized fatty loin part, called toro is sold at a premium price. The profitability of bluefin tuna is so high, in fact, that yesterday the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) succumbed to pressure from fishing industry lobbyists and chose not to ban bluefin exports, quite possibly condemning the species to extinction within the next couple of years.

Scott Bowen has a bit of a rant at True/Slant that I have to share more than a little agreement with:

So, who gets to kill the last bluefin tuna? The Japanese? Who will eat the last $5,000 slice — some Japanese billionaire, or some fat sashimi-sucking bastard in LA?

Who gets to shoot the last polar bear? A white Canadian, or a member of a First Nation? What will be the opening price in a bidding war for the pelt — $10 million?

It’s times like this, when I read news like that above, that I react with a sense of the ludicrous — as ludicrous as those delegates at that UN conference on endangered species who acted to endanger those species further — and I start to speculate that there just aren’t enough predators eating people.

The remark about the polar bears? Yeah, CITES chose not to ban the sale of polar bear products (pelts, primarily) either. But at least global warming will kill off all the polar bears before the hunters will, so we don’t have to feel quite so guilty about that.

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Don’t Eat That!

By Brian Filed in Food Tagged with , , December 11th, 2009 @ 1:34 pm

flesh salad

There are plenty of gross things that you probably wouldn’t eat in the first place, but this website has a list of seven things that you probably eat all the time that some scientists would never consider putting in their mouths for one reason or another: additives, unsanitary production methods, chemical leaching from packaging, etc. You probably won’t be too surprised at the things that made the list, although one of them took me a little by surprise. Also, a couple of them are so ubiquitous in our commoditized food supply that there’s no real alternative except to stop eating those things altogether.

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Enlightening (and Discouraging) Factoid Of The Day

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , October 28th, 2009 @ 11:37 am

This little chart from the July issue of Mother Jones was somewhat eye-opening to me. It lists a variety of consumer goods ranging from a microchip to a mid-size automobile and the amount of water needed to produce each article. For example: a 16-ounce bottle of Diet Coke requires 33 gallons of water to be produced. Now, there’s a decided lack of explanation as to how the author reached these numbers, but I presume the water is used in a wide variety of ways throughout the production cycle, not simply in a direct correlation to the item. Spread out over transportation, package manufacture, product manufacture, factory infrastructure, and other requirements, any single point in the process probably doesn’t consume all that much water, it’s the aggregate amount (further multiplied by the millions of units produced) that becomes mindblowing.

Water footprint calculations are rapidly becoming as critical to understanding the impact of mass production of consumer goods as carbon footprints, since the availability of potable water looms large as a serious global crisis. Whether people want to believe it or not, the day is approaching where we will be forced to make choices about everything we consume because of our willy-nilly approach to resource usage now.

Here’s another one to make your head spin: the carbon footprint of owning a pet in the industrialized nations is DOUBLE the carbon footprint of owning an SUV and driving it 6,200 miles per year. When the day comes, what’s it going to be: Fido or Ford?

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When The Swallows Salmon Come Back To Capistrano Paris

By Brian Filed in Links, Science Tagged with , , , , , September 2nd, 2009 @ 3:09 pm

fishermen-monet
Fishermen on the Seine at Poissy, by Claude Monet

The Seine River, which runs through the middle of Paris, was once home to dozens of species of fish, but, like many other urban rivers, eventually became too polluted to sustain them. Atlantic salmon were present in the river well into the mid-20th century but had not been seen since then.

So scientists and fishermen alike were thrilled to learn that this year as many as 1000 salmon had made the upstream swim from the ocean all the way to the City Of Lights . The return of the salmon is considered to be a significant milestone in France’s efforts to restore the Seine ecosystem, since they are one of the largest species of fish to live in that environment and require the presence of smaller food organisms, adequate oxygen levels, and other indicators of a healthy river.

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“Things I No Longer Believe In”

By Brian Filed in Blogs, Links, Rants Tagged with , , , , , , March 3rd, 2009 @ 2:45 pm

Blogger and magazine guru Rex Hammock had a very good post over the weekend entitled “Things I No Longer Believe In”. It’s mostly aimed at the destruction of the credibility of the institutions and individuals who have played a role in the economic disaster we’re going through. He singles out Congress for its inability to see beyond the short-term political strategies of its membership, the notion of any institution being “too big to fail”, and the absurdity of “real-tine market analysis” on CNBC, among others.

I thought it was a very thoughtful exercise, and I agreed with all of his choices and rationales for them. Still, I think I can add a few of my own:

“The American Dream” — okay, so this one needs a little more definition, because I think there are actually several different “American Dreams” to choose from, so the one I am specifically referring to is the one that posits that every American can and should be a middle-class homeowner living in a suburb. This idea really didn’t manifest itself as “The American Dream” until after WWII; previously, the “American Dream” was more about rising up from lowly serf to captain of industry in the Horatio Alger style, but the Great Depression pretty much proved what a pipe dream that really was to most Americans, and so sights were set on the less-lofty goal of home ownership as the pinnacle of achievement for the majority of Americans. Of all the ideas that went to hell in a handbasket with the boom and bust of the last decade, it is this one that was oversold by greedy and unscrupulous banks and mortgage companies, then twisted into unrecognizable permutations that would have otherwise been dismissed as outright fraud years earlier. On closer historical examination, there’s a lot to suggest this wasn’t a particularly sustainable idea in the first place, but I’m usually willing to give the decision-makers of the past the benefit of the doubt for not being able to imagine THIS as the future.

Economists — Who did these people fellate to convince the world that they deserved doctoral degrees? They’ve proven to be very good at rationalizing things after the fact, but anybody can do that. What they obviously can’t do is explain how to keep the economy from falling into a bottomless pit. Pet theories, cherry-picked examples and evidence, full-blown quackery, and an appalling determination to promote their own ideas over anybody elses make them the least-reputable “scientists” one can possibly imagine. Lately there’s been some complaint that the media are relying on their own bloviating gasbag pundits for insightful commentary than “real economists”, but that’s probably a wise move on the part of the media outlets.

“Saving For Your Future” — Yeah, right. An entire generation of people has just watched whatever retirement savings they had disappear into billions of scattered electrons. The older half of the Baby Boom will be the last generation of Americans to engage in the cultural fantasy of “Retirement”, and the rest of us will work until we drop dead in our cubicles. As my half of the Baby Boom skids headfirst into our “golden Years”, we’re going to have to reinvent collective housing, develop entirely new models of labor that accommodate older employees, and probably stage a “Million Grannies March” on Washington to undo the half-assed systems that our older Boomer siblings didn’t have to worry about because they didn’t need it.

“Planned Obsolescence” — The “everything’s a widget” model of capitalism is going to have to go the way of the dodo tout suite. Making everything from phones to TVs to dishwashers to cars so freakin’ flimsy that they break just to look at them will not be sustainable from the standpoint of consumers without money to spend, from businesses that can’t constantly sell “more more more more”, and from the rapidly encroaching realities of our depleted natural resources and shifting climate. This means that everything the businesspeople think about running their corporations is now and forevermore obsolete, and they might as well all give up and start over again.

I’ll keep adding to this list as I come up with others. You can, too.

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Linkapalooza – Food

By Brian Filed in Food Tagged with , , , , , October 15th, 2008 @ 2:45 pm
  • Much buzz about Michael Pollan’s latest piece in the New York Times. It’s done in the form of an open letter to the next President of the United States (whichever candidate it might be) to bring to his attention the importance and likelihood of a food crisis that will face the entire world, including America.

    But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

    While the article is putatively aimed at the President-Elect-To-Be, what he describes is something we all need to pay attention to.

  • Since this summer I have been following Wasted Food, a blog about…well, wasted food. In light of what Michael Pollan is saying, paying attention to how our society wastes food so trivially and looking for ways to reduce that waste (personally AND institutionally) is critical. Here’s a post from July about one common example: wasting food at conferences, business meetings, and other events. Another one of the pet causes of the blog’s author, Jonathan Bloom, is getting rid of trays in cafeterias. Studies show that people take more food when they can carry it on a tray, and are subsequently more likely to waste some of it. Today, he links to an article at Slate about getting too much produce from a CSA and suggests solutions like donating the produce to a local food bank (if they’ll take perishables), or, if the oversupply is a regular problem, splitting the subscription with someone else. This is a neat blog to follow for a perspective on something we often don’t even think about.
  • Several years ago, Massachusetts finally put an end to allowing the sale of non-pasteurized fresh apple cider. It was an unfortunate decision, in my opinion, because it meant that we could no longer buy fresh cider and let it ferment a little to get “hard”. The fizzy tang of some real hard cider was a wonderful autumn treat. Commercial hard cider is nothing like the stuff you get from an apple farm. The rationale, of course, was food safety, but there wasn’t any real evidence to show that people were getting sick from unpasteurized cider. It’s rather like the federal regulations against raw-milk cheese — it may be “for your own good”, but it ruins something special and relatively harmless in the process.

    The obvious solution, thus, is to make your own hard cider from apples you press yourself. I remember going to an apple farm in New Hampshire many years ago with our friends Tony and Sharon and squeezing our own cider from an old-fashioned apple press (which we then brought home and let ferment), but that was messy and labor-intensive. This Instructables.com article tells you how to make hard cider using homebrew equipment and champagne yeast. It’s still a slightly different beast from the natural fermentation, since you do actually pasteurize the apple juice before adding the yeast, but results in something a bit more potent than what you can buy at the store.

  • Last week I took Starbucks to task for their blah “piadini” breakfast sandwich, but apparently they are going like gangbusters with their new “Perfect Oatmeal”. I haven’t tried it myself, yet, but apparently what you get is just a packet of instant oatmeal, a cup of hot water, and a packet of dried fruits and nuts to stir in. I guess the novelty factor for a generation of people who never got hot cereal at home is a part of the success, because that doesn’t sound all that special to me. I can make instant oatmeal at home and doctor it up just as easily. If their next “amazing” new breakfast idea is those little boxes of Kellogg cereal that you can pour the milk right into, I’m giving up.

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