Health

Food & agriculture – Feb 12

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-Children ‘believe sheep lay eggs’
-Red wigglers could be the new black gold
-The GM tomato that stays fresh for SIX WEEKS – but would you want to eat it?
-India bans planting of first GM food crop
-Another Assault on the SOLE Food Movement
-Legislation intended to help orchard companies
-Demand for food “staggering”

Tracking U.S. farmers’ supply of nitrogen fertilizer

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We burn through more of it per capita than any other country; and our appetite for it can only be sated with massive imports. No, not oil–I’m talking about nitrogen fertilizer. With only 5 percent of the world population, the U.S. consumes nearly 12 percent of the globe’s annual synthetic nitrogen fertilizer production. And we’re producing less and less of it at home–meaning that, as with petroleum, we’re increasingly dependent on other nations for this key crop nutrient.

Medical dark matter: Living conditions determine health

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Although doctors can save some sick people, they have no power to make most people live longer. Despite over $2 trillion a year of modern medical care, US life expectancy has dropped to 50th in the world (CIA 2009) behind all of Europe and behind some very poor countries. It seems to me that societal factors account for about 85% of differences in life expectancy, with genetics and individual health care accounting for the remainder. … Our American lifestyle takes years off our lives and cannot be sustained indefinitely by available energy resources.

Entropy revisited

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One way of looking at our current set of predicaments is that we’ve been on a binge, consuming energy considerably faster than it can be captured and stored by Earth’s ecosystems. While fossil fuels once appeared limitless (and still do to deniers of peak oil), and though we’re literally bathed in energy (in the form of sunlight), the disappearance of the fossil-fuel storehouse accumulated over millions of years isn’t something that can be replaced with anything nearly as convenient as fossil fuels.

In Defense of Food (audio)

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According to In Defense of Food author Michael Pollan, “…the advent of “nutritionism” has vastly complicated how Americans see food, without doing very much for our health. Nutritionism arose to deal with genuine issues – addressing chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes and many cancers – but now seems to be obscuring and perpetuating the real problems of the American diet”, says Pollan. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California on January 27, 2010.

A farming model to sustain the world

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Ten years from now, in 2020, when we try to look back, Indian agriculture can be transformed into a healthy and vibrant system where farmer suicides have been relegated to history, where distress and despondency has been replaced by the lost pride in farming, where agriculture becomes sustainable in the long run, and does not add on to global warming.