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Food blog no. 1 – waste not, want not

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My friend and colleague, Prof. Ellie Perkins recently forwarded an article to a number of us about the "cost of eggs". I assumed that it was all about the nutritional value of hens' eggs and expected to read that I could soon keep chickens in my back garden in Toronto - and why not? Vancouverites can. With the advent of the growing season, I am currently in an "urban agriculture" headspace, as well as engaged in the ongoing battle to increase the number of vegetarian meals that my family eats (for both cost and carbon footprint reasons) to over 50%. It turned out that Ellie's article was a very curious piece about the high value placed on the eggs of students with high SAT scores by couples hoping to conceive via fertility treatments and egg donations! Eggs are parts of life cycles, and all organisms need food as they go through their life cycles. Food security and sustainability of supply are huge issues. When I began teaching ecology at York in 1991, global per capita food production had been steadily rising. In recent years, per capita food production has been declining for various reasons, but there is still enough food to feed the world, if we could get it distributed.

Tristram Stuart's book Waste, highlights the issue of how much food is wasted as a result of our industrial-scale approach to agriculture and best-by dates which result in enormous quantities of food being thrown out. Many families throw out much of the food from their fridges and GOOD magazine tells us that the average American wastes 0.5 lbs of food per day. In London, England, 176,000 bananas are thrown out everyday. Both GOOD and Stuart point out that, if diverted appropriately, this wasted food, could address issues of hunger quite seriously and it could also reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Another way of putting into perspective the information about just how much food never makes it into people's stomachs, is to take a look at the excellent series, What the World Eats. It is based on the book, Hungry Planet, and shows photos of families from around the world with their weekly groceries spread out before them, as well as the cost. A picture really is worth a thousand words, and this is the book that I would want to see in everyone's house, on the kitchen table.

The 2001 AAAS Atlas of Population and Environment, is also an excellent resource.

So, take-home message number 1 - eat ALL of the food that you buy for you and your family. Do this before thinking about eating locally or organically or turning vegan - which I'll cover later. Reducing food waste at the local kitchen level takes a lot of planning and is hard work. I DO THIS, and so can you. Follow GOOD's and Martha's advice and plan weekly family menus. Freeze leftovers and use up food that's on the edge of going off. As Gordon Ramsay  points out, time and again, in his books and tv shows - good restaurants waste very little food - they would not make money if they did.

Dawn R. Bazely

Obesity adds to global warming – but where’s the paper?

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The reason why I found blogging so tough to sustain, was that I could not overcome my urge to check into every last detail, and the time needed to fact-check my blogs was getting way out of hand. Here's one hitherto unpublished blog: last May, 2008, the Globe & Mail's Life section had an article about the research of Dr. Phil Edwards, Senior Lecturer, and Prof. Ian Roberts, at the prestigious London School of Hygeine & Tropical Medicine. Basically, the Globe (along with other media outlets, including the USA's MSNBC site, CNN and the UK's Daily Telegraph) carried the story, entitled "Obesity adds to global warming", about the research that describes how obese and overweight people "require more fuel to transport them and the food they eat", and then makes the link between this and the greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, that is driving climate change. I interpreted this as leaving me with the following take home sustainability message - "eat less and lose weight, and not just for for your own health, but for the environment."

This reported research finding illustrates two really important things about the pain of peer-reviewed research: As scientists, we often take years to show that intuitive ideas and guesses do hold. There are no surprises about this particular result - it takes more energy to move heavy goods (you pay more for it at the post office). BUT - I am more likely to take this finding seriously because it comes from academics who have published their research through the highly-scrutinized peer-review process. This is known as "publish or perish" and it's what makes university-based research more reliable than non-refereed, unscrutinized research.

The second thing, is that as a scientist, it's not enough for me to read about this in the newspaper. I immediately went to access The Lancet, the prestigious journal in which the study was published. And this is where the fun began. First, I could not find any such article in the latest on-line issue, which I accessed through the York University Library. So, I searched the entire contents of the journal. I found a just-published article called "Transport Policy is Food Policy" by the two authors, which I thought MUST be the journal paper that all the media outlets were referring to. BUT, the download link to the pdf was wrong and it gave me another article (this does occasionally happen with on-line science journals). After a bit more persistence, I DID get the article, which turns out not to be a full journal article, but an item of correspondence. Hmm - I wonder what the review process is for 'correspondence'?

Next I found, by googling a bit more, that there are numerous peer-reviewed journal articles making the links between greenhouse gas emissions, food transportation policy and obesity. Wow - I had no idea that this was such an academic issue. Next, I read some articles that quote a bunch of US Academics who counter the point of the Edwards & Robert's paper.  Wow, this could have taken the entire weekend to research, so, in the end I gave up my Saturday morning blogging in frustration at the time sink I was turning it into, and grabbed another cup of coffee. Next time someone asks me exactly how the kind of thinking that I do about sustainability differs from non-professorial sustainability thinkers, I will direct them to this blog.

Dawn Bazely

Save The Walrus – by reading and subscribing to it

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We have just decided to do our little bit, and to renew our family subscription to The Walrus magazine, which has been in financial peril, as far as I can tell, since its inception. This is very unfortunate, because it has some of the most thoughtful, in-depth writing about sustainability issues to be found anywhere in Canada, and, indeed, in the world.  For example, the article on urban agriculture, The Future Has Begun in Jan-Feb 2009 is excellent. When I look at our attempt at an urban eco-garden - note the clothes line, upside-down tomato planters, beans, peppers, many herbs, composter (rat-free, this time, we hope), rain barrel, and lots of native plants, aimed at encouraging insects - I believe that it is significant that I don't see this replicated much, if at all, in my neighbourhood. In Toronto, we have a very long way to go compared with Havana, Cuba, and The Walrus can help us along the way. Please think about supporting it.

Dawn R. Bazely

PS Update in September 2010 - I just renewed my Walrus subscription AGAIN and gave it as gift to Annette Dubreuil

Quiz: How green is your food?

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Source: BBC Nov 2004.

1. The energy used to import a kg of fresh spinach from California to the UK is equivalent to running a 100 watt light bulb for:

A: 1 year
B: 1 month
C: 2 weeks
D: 1 week

2. It takes 3.5 times as much of what to produce a litre of non-organic milk compared to a litre of organic milk?

A: Energy
B: Water
C: Fertilizer
D: Land

3. A typical British family of four emits 4.2 tonnes of C02 from their house each year and 4.4 tonnes from their car. How much is emitted from the production, packaging and distribution of the food they eat?

A: 1 tonne
B: 2 tonnes
C: 4 tonnes
D: 8 tonnes

Answers:

1. B
2. A – Organic milk comes from cows which are fed on pasture which is not treated with fertilizers and pesticides. Much of the extra energy used in the production of non-organic milk is energy used in the production of the fertilizer.
3. D

Fridge Free for a Year

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This article is a first person account of a Torontonian that made the leap to attempt a very unique project. As the article points out, Canadians are among the highest energy users in the world. There are so many modern conveniences that we take for granted regardless of their ecological cost or how they disconnect us from natures' cycles. This article decided that the fridge is one such convenience. Upon unplugging her fridge, the author decided to learn about how communities used to deal with food. She tells a story of how her father's community built a barn insulated with sawdust and used huge chunks of ice cut from a river in the winter that they stored in the barn keeping it cool throughout the summer months. This barn was used to maintain a community grocery store year round with no power other than human power and horses. She uses examples of how little of our food actually needs refrigeration. Most vegetables keep quite well at room temperature for at least a week. Gardens allow you to take food or herbs when you need to. Of course, those of us that have lived our entire lives with this modern convenience forget that food never knew the inside of a fridge till 50 years ago (Refrigeration was invented in the late 19th Century, but it was not until the 1950's that it was common). In the winter it is rather easy to keep things cool, but in the summer you have to be more creative. This person used a basement cellar, which is common in any older house. Other techniques involved just bowls of water. While, I do not expect people will be unplugging their fridge anytime soon this was an interesting article and reminds us of how we take for granted so many conveniences in our day to day life.

The Big Green Purse! AKA The Sustainable Shopping Bible Pt. 4/4

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Pt. 4 - Sustainable Food Shopping, and Other Notes

FOOD

  • Styrofoam used to store food (i.e restaurant leftovers) can't be recycled or reused after its been tainted by food or coffee. It is also classified as a possible carcinogen by the U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services
  • The EPA cautions everyone (especially kids and pregnant women) against eating tuna, due to contamination from mercury that precipitates out of air pollution generated by industrial smokestacks
  • Avoid American BEEF - the European Union officially does not accept meat from the US because of large amounts of growth hormonoes used in the cattle
  • Choosing Sustainable Seafood
    • Shop for seafood sold under the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) label - certifies those fish come from sustainable sources
    • Avoid large predator fish when dining out (i.e. shark, tuna, swordfish) bc they play a critical role in marine ecosystems, and also concentrate the most toxins. Therefore best to pick smaller fish i.e. tilapia

OTHER NOTES

  • Rainforests - Disappearing at a rate of 6 soccer fields a minute
  • 40% of Central American rainforests have been converted into pastures for beef production, 90% of which is exported to the U.S. primarily for use in the fast food market or pet food.
  • Chapter 6 focuses on ways to trim meat from your diet as a way of protecting rainforests from the grazing that leads to their destruction
  • According to Environmental Defense, the burning of tropical forests accounts for at least 10% of the greenhouse effect Forests in North America
  • According to the Center for a New American Dream, U.S. paper consumption is the world's highest, devouring 12,340 sq miles of forests each year.
  • Saving paper o The Center for a New American Dream estimates that recycling one ton of paper saves 17 trees, 7000 gallons of water, and 380 gallons of oil
  • According to a U of Washington study, women are more susceptible than men to air pollution and the heart problems it causes bc among other reasons, our blood vessels are smaller.

Air Pollution

  • Everyone is susceptible to asthma from air pollution (I have asthma so this is a big issue for me)
  • Environmental Protection Agency: we all may suffer as many as 554,000 asthma attacks each year bc of air pollution

Remember: The Big Green Purse Shopping Principles:

1. Buy less 2. Read the label 3. Support sustainable standards 4. Look for third-party verification 5. Choose fewer ingredients 6. Pick less packaging 7. Buy local

As a supplement to these notes, please visit http://www.theworldwomenwant.com/documents/13_questions.pdf for a guide on smart environmental shopping choices.

Local Fish…

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Taking the local movement one step closer to home...or rather your living room. Artist Mathieu Lehanneur has conceptualized and developed the Local River...a spin on the old fish-tube where people can enjoy watching fish from the comforts of their home while picking out tomorrow nights dinner, fish!

http://www.mathieulehanneur.com

Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce

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This wallet-size guide from the EWG will help you decide which produce to buy organic, and which are lowest in pesticides, so you can eat healthy without emptying your wallet. I recommend the health-conscious shopper to print and keep a copy with you in your wallet or purse:

P.S. It is always better to buy locally in order to reduce gas emissions from transport vehicles

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