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Insects (the original white meat)
Janet Raloff, ScienceNews
… In the industrialized world, most people find the idea of eating insects repugnant. Processed foods containing bug bits tend to reflect poor sanitation. Because bugs can host disease-causing germs, insects tainting the food supply pose a health risk
Yet in many parts of the world, diners actually desire insects. Youngsters in central Africa may down ants or grubs while at play. Urbane snack-seeking consumers throng street vendors throughout Southeast Asia to buy fried crickets. Even car-driving Aborigines in Australia’s outback may motor a couple of hours to find, and then picnic on, a cache of honey ants.
Residents of at least 113 nations eat bugs, says Julieta Ramos-Elorduy of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. This practice, known as entomophagy (en-toh-MOFF-uh-jee), makes sense, she says, because insects tend to be quite nutritious. Indeed, many scientists around the world have put insect eating on their research menus. It was also the focus of a February United Nations conference in Thailand, where researchers discussed insect-eating trends and evaluated the nutritional value of bugs and the environmental aspects of entomophagy.
(23 May 2008)
Related:
The Food Insects Newsletter
The Human Use of Insects as a Food Resource
Sidebar: Audubon’s Insectarium
Fertilizer and the looming global food crisis
Mike Banos, American Chronicle
Few people are aware that beneath the worries over rice which pervade media these days is a looming disaster which could make the rice crisis seem puny in comparison.
To understand the magnitude of this global menace, one would first have to appreciate how world food production quintupled many times over from the early 19th century to the present, making possible the global population explosion.
Of course, advances in global agricultural production technology played their part in boosting food production worldwide, but even their combined impact cannot compensate for something basic to agriculture which has been mainly responsible for increases in farm production since the earliest times: fertilizer.
… So why does this all matter to the ordinary consumer already burdened by rising prices of food, rice and petroleum products? With the dropping utilization of fertilizer as a result of its rising prices, domestic rice production is expected to fall by over 50% of the rice produced last year and the crisis that is being perceived today will further escalate to real crisis level as early as 2009.
(23 May 2008)
Canadian fertilizer sellers appeal for government help in ensuring security
Canadian Press
Canadian farm-input retailers are looking for government financial help in upgrading security at their facilities to prevent fertilizer from falling into the hands of terrorists and makers of illegal drugs.
… The association notes that fertilizers “have been used for sinister purposes by criminal and terrorist elements,” notably in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 which killed 168 people and injured more than 800. Anhydrous ammonia is also used in making methamphetamine.
(23 May 2008)
Heritage Foods: Preserving Diversity II – Gardens of Destiny (audio)
Jon Steinman, Deconstructing Dinner via Global Public Media
The diversity in the varieties of crops being grown in Canada has dwindled significantly. Virtually all of the fruits, vegetables, grains, livestock and pretty much every ingredient found on grocery store shelves, is of a variety that has purely been bred for profit. At no time has the importance of maintaining diversity or flavour and nutrition ever been a concern for the powerful industrial food system that has taken hold of the North American diet.
This series will explore what risks accompany the loss of such diversity and will expose the many farmers and organizations who are preserving Canada’s heritage varieties of food and protecting our food supply from the exclusive control of multinational interests.
Part II – Gardens of Destiny
On Part II, we meet with heritage seed saver Dan Jason of Salt Spring Seeds. Jason is exalted as a Canadian food security hero and icon in Gardens of Destiny – the recently released film by Vancouver filmmaker Jocelyn Demers.
(1 May 2008, but just posted)
