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Instead of Eating to Diet, They’re Eating to Enjoy
Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times
AFTER decades of obsessing about fat, calories and carbs, many dieters have made the unorthodox decision to simply enjoy food again.
That doesn’t mean they’re giving up on health or even weight loss. Instead, consumers and nutritionists say they are seeing a shift toward “positive eating” — shunning deprivation diets and instead focusing on adding seasonal vegetables, nuts, berries and other healthful foods to their plates.
For 32-year-old Rina Gonzalez-Echandi of Los Angeles, giving up calorie counting and packaged foods and adding real food back into her diet has helped her maintain her weight and even be happier. She used to watch fat and calories so obsessively she would sometimes avoid socializing.
… And there are other indicators of a shift in eating habits. In May, the market research firm Information Resources reported that 53 percent of consumers say they are cooking from scratch more than they did just six months ago, in part, no doubt, because of the rising cost of prepared foods.
Sales of organic foods have surged, and the number of farmers’ markets has more than doubled since the mid-1990s.
Nutrition experts and consumers say positive eating trends are being fueled in part by the failures of the past
… Marion Nestle, the New York University nutritionist whose book “What To Eat” (North Point Press, 2006) focuses on sensible eating, said she thinks people view food as the enemy, when the real problem is that they have forgotten how to enjoy food in a healthful way.
(16 September 2008)
US university campuses ban cafeteria trays in effort to go green
Guardian
Hungry after a recent day of classes, Lake Forest College freshman Peter Bacon piled an odd assortment of chicken patties, a grilled cheese sandwich, Tater Tots, mashed potatoes and meatloaf onto two dinner plates.
And he would have taken even more food, he said, if one staple weren’t missing from the college’s cafeteria: a plastic tray to carry it all.
“At most, I’ll carry two, maybe three plates on top of each other,” Bacon, 18, said. “I would love to have a tray.”
But students returning this fall to Lake Forest College in Illinois and dozens of other campuses nationwide are finding that’s no longer an option. In one of the latest – and perhaps quirkiest – environmentally conscious initiatives, cafeteria trays are becoming as outdated as mystery meat.
Ditching the trays decreases food waste, conserves water and energy used in cleaning and reduces the need for polluting detergents, according to proponents of trayless dining.
(16 September 2008)
Australian farmers go green as petrol prices rise (transcript & video)
Hamish Fitzsimmons, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
KERRY OBRIEN: High petrol prices are hitting everyone but many farmers are copping a double hit. They’re also dealing with rising prices for fertilisers made from petroleum. The increased costs are providing added incentive for some farmers to consider alternatives like organic and bio dynamic farming. Aside from the cost factor, chemical free farming has a clean, green marketing appeal. As Hamish Fitzsimmons reports.
HAMISH FITZSIMMONS, JOURNALIST: Farmers from all over Victoria have come to this 97 hectare dairy farm in Gippsland to learn about chemical free bio dynamic farming.
MATT MAHONEY, FARMER: There’s a huge them and us attitude in our farming scene. The conventional people think organic people are just witches and strange at times and don’t even wanna hear what they’ve got to say.
HAMISH FITZSIMMONS: But with the cost of petroleum and, therefore, fertiliser soaring, some farmers are being forced to listen.
MATT MAHONEY: The costs are just going through the roof and we’re starting to feel more and more cornered by the big companies. You just feel that there’s got to be another way.
DAVID PANNAN, FARMER: A lot of people are at crunch point particularly if they didn’t get a good result in the last couple of years financially, they really need to get a good result.
RON SMITH, FARMER: The actual soil has, is really, really healthy and that soil makes a really healthy plant and the animals the same. We’re at the end of the food chain and I feel really it enhances the health of people, this type of food.
HAMISH FITZSIMMONS: The popularity of bio-dynamic farming is growing despite its slightly mystical reputation, thanks to the use of moon phases to guide planting and watering, and making fertiliser in buried cow horns.
… HAMISH FITZSIMMONS: But for some, it just comes down to the taste.
MAX ALLEN, WINE WRITER: The number of bio dynamic wines I taste, without even knowing they’re bio-dynamic, and I’m writing tasting notes and writing words like bright and lively, and the tasting notes just keep tumbling out, then I learn that they’re bio-dynamic, that’s happening a lot.
HAMISH FITZSIMMONS: Wine writer Max Allen has became a champion of bio-dynamic wines after being consistently impressed by their quality. He says since a few major winemakers’ embraced bio-dynamics about four years ago, it’s been growing steadily.
… MAARTEN STAPPER, AGRONOMIST: Our traditional farming is only 5, 6 decades old anyway, the heavy use of synthetic chemicals and synthetic fertilisers. Cause our grandparents were farming the way organic farming is farming now, and that knowledge we have to go back to.
(18 September 2008)
Bio-dynamic farming does sound strange, but the results are impressive. -BA
Plants In Forest Emit Aspirin Chemical To Deal With Stress;
Science Daily
Discovery May Help Agriculture
—
Plants in a forest respond to stress by producing significant amounts of a chemical form of aspirin, scientists have discovered. The finding, by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), opens up new avenues of research into the behavior of plants and their impacts on air quality, and it also has the potential to give farmers an early warning signal about crops that are failing.
Unlike humans, who are advised to take aspirin as a fever suppressant, plants have the ability to produce their own mix of aspirin-like chemicals, triggering the formation of proteins that boost their biochemical defenses and reduce injury,” says NCAR scientist Thomas Karl, who led the study.
The methyl salicylate also may be a mechanism whereby a stressed plant communicates to neighboring plants, warning them of the threat. Researchers in laboratories have demonstrated that a plant may build up its defenses if it is linked in some way to another plant that is emitting the chemical. Now that the NCAR team has demonstrated that methyl salicylate can build up in the atmosphere above a stressed forest, scientists are speculating that plants may use the chemical to activate an ecosystem-wide immune response.
“These findings show tangible proof that plant-to-plant communication occurs on the ecosystem level,” says NCAR scientist Alex Guenther, a co-author of the study. “It appears that plants have the ability to communicate through the atmosphere.”
Implications for farmers
The discovery raises the possibility that farmers, forest managers, and others may eventually be able to start monitoring plants for early signs of a disease, an insect infestation, or other types of stress.
(18 September 2008)
The new organic
The future of food may depend on an unlikely marriage: organic farmers and genetic engineering.
Pamela Ronald, Boston Globe
… The world faces an enormous challenge: Its growing population demands more food and other crops, but standard commercial agriculture uses industrial quantities of pesticides and harms the environment in other ways. The organic farming movement has shown that it is possible to dramatically reduce the use of insecticides, and that doing so benefits both farm workers and the environment. But organic farming also has serious limits – there are many pests and diseases that cannot be controlled using organic approaches, and organic crops are generally more expensive to produce and buy.
To meet the appetites of the world’s population without drastically hurting the environment requires a visionary new approach: combining genetic engineering and organic farming.
This idea is anathema to many people, especially the advocates who have helped build organic farming into a major industry in richer countries. As reflected by statements on their websites, it is clear that most organic farming trade organizations are deeply, viscerally opposed to genetically engineered crops and seeds. Virtually all endorse the National Organic Standards Board’s recommendation that genetic engineering be prohibited in organic production.
But ultimately, this resistance hurts farmers, consumers, and the planet. Without the use of genetically engineered seed, the beneficial effects of organic farming – a thoughtful, ecologically minded approach to growing food – will likely remain small.
Pamela Ronald is a professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis, and co-author with her husband, an organic farmer, of “Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food.”
(16 March 2008)
I guess it is theoretically possible that GMOs could be useful. However, the technology is in the hands of large corporations, whose goal is profit, not solving the problem of world hunger. I’m also concerned about the dangers of GMOs – something that researchers and corporations minimize. -BA
