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Silkworms: an environmentally friendly delicacy?
Ecoworldly via Guardian
… Silkworms have dropped (or crawled) their way into my diet as well. Boiled silkworms have a pungent, almost bitter smell and a similar taste. When you bite down on them (brace yourself if you have a delicate stomach and an unfamiliarity with eating insects), they pop juicily in your mouth. An acquired taste? Yes. It took me trying to impress my Korean date to want to taste them a second time. But after the initial hurdle that accompanies wildly unfamiliar cuisines, I’ve begun to enjoy eating silkworms.
… Aside from their debatable qualities as a “delicacy,” there are two other, environmentally-conscious motivations for eating silkworms. Firstly, there’s the “waste not, want not” reasoning behind eating silkworms after they’ve produced the silk.
This logic presumes that if they weren’t eaten, they would become a waste product. The second reason touches on health and climate change. Simply put, insects don’t have the large carbon footprint of cows, pigs, and chickens. Moreover, many insects (silkworms included) have been found to be a rich source of protein, fiber, and some vitamins and minerals. They’ve even been eyed as an option for a protein-rich space food for astronauts.
Silkworms are also one of the only two widely domesticated insects (the other is the bee). This might just make silkworms the healthiest and most environmentally benign domesticated food animal in the world.
(17 November 2008)
Game beware: it’s the return of the poacher
Andy McSmith, The Independent
Once, the poacher was a man with big pockets in his raincoat sneaking on to an aristocrat’s land to steal game for his family pot. Now he is likely to be part of a gang from town, in it for hard cash, rampaging through the countryside with guns, crossbows or snares.
Police in rural areas across Britain are reporting a dramatic increase in poaching, as the rise in food prices and the reality of recession increases the temptation to deal in stolen venison, salmon, or rarer meat and fish.
Organised and sometimes armed gangs of poachers are accused of behaving dangerously, intimidating residents, causing damage to crops or to gates and fences. Squads have also been out in the countryside “lamping”, poachers using lights to transfix animals…
(17 November 2008)
Portland’s low-income neighborhoods are city’s ‘food deserts’
Paige Parker, The Oregonian
A trip to a city grocery store seems like a small thing.
The last time you went it took an hour or so, right? You probably stuck your spouse with the kids some Saturday while you shopped, then ferried home the heavy bags by car.
Not Lesli Calderon. She might as well live in a desert. The closest grocery stores are more like mirages. No bus lines or sidewalks lead to one of the two in her neighborhood, and Calderon can’t drive there because she can’t afford a car. She could take a bus to the other, but she can’t afford the food.
So when Calderon’s cupboards run bare, she hops a bus in Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood.
And she rides it.
And rides it.
Until she reaches Clackamas County, and WinCo, 10 miles away.
It can take four hours, round trip.
When getting to market takes this much effort, epidemiologists consider it a threat to our collective health. Where we live determines where we buy food, which influences what we eat, factors into whether we’re fat and can seal whether, someday, we get diabetes or have a heart attack.
Low-income and minority families, prone to obesity and dietary-related diseases, are also more likely to live in communities where nutritious food is hard to come by, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation reports. These are otherwise known as “food deserts.” Nationally, the typical low-income neighborhood has 30 percent fewer supermarkets than higher-income neighborhoods.
(15 November 2008)
Recommended by Eric De Place at WorldChanging who writes: “a fabulous story on the profound equity implications of pedestrian-unfriendly communities.”
