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photo “Paying a Price for Loving Red Meat” (via Bittman, banging the drums for “lessmeatism”): A new study of more than 500,000 Americans has provided the best evidence yet that our affinity for red meat has exacted a hefty price on our health and limited our longevity. The study found that, other things being equal, the men and women who consumed the most red and processed meat were likely to die sooner, especially from one of our two leading killers, heart disease and cancer, than people who consumed much smaller amounts of these foods.

“Paying a Price for Loving Red Meat” (via Bittman, banging the drums for “lessmeatism”):

A new study of more than 500,000 Americans has provided the best evidence yet that our affinity for red meat has exacted a hefty price on our health and limited our longevity.

The study found that, other things being equal, the men and women who consumed the most red and processed meat were likely to die sooner, especially from one of our two leading killers, heart disease and cancer, than people who consumed much smaller amounts of these foods.

April 30, 2009

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link Eat fresh, eat local

The Natural Resource Defense Council has a nifty application to find out what’s fresh in your region.

Here’s New York’s annual calendar. The sad news all we have going for us right now are apples, onions, potatoes, and turnips. But neighboring states have asparagus, herbs, lettuce, spinach, and tomatoes (some of which are grown in hothouses).

April 22, 2009

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photo I dream of urban chickens. This man is living my dream. From National Geographic: In New York City, senior gardener Abu Talib oversees the Taqwa Community Farm and its 13 chickens. In 19th-century Manhattan, hogs roamed the streets and cattle grazed in public parks. Today, chickens are the urban livestock of choice, and not just in New York. City dwellers across the U.S. are adding hens to their yards and gardens, garnering fresh eggs, fertilizer, and community ties, with localities debating and updating their ordinances accordingly. Urban chickens fell out of favor in the last century because of industrialization and other factors. In the 1990s, though, they enjoyed a renaissance in the local-food-loving Pacific Northwest. The current recession and farm-to-table movement have taken the trend further still. “Just get a few chickens and you can feed yourself,” says AbuTalib of the Bronx’s Taqwa Community Farm. “He who controls your breadbasket controls your destiny.”

I dream of urban chickens. This man is living my dream.

From National Geographic:

In New York City, senior gardener Abu Talib oversees the Taqwa Community Farm and its 13 chickens.

In 19th-century Manhattan, hogs roamed the streets and cattle grazed in public parks. Today, chickens are the urban livestock of choice, and not just in New York. City dwellers across the U.S. are adding hens to their yards and gardens, garnering fresh eggs, fertilizer, and community ties, with localities debating and updating their ordinances accordingly.

Urban chickens fell out of favor in the last century because of industrialization and other factors. In the 1990s, though, they enjoyed a renaissance in the local-food-loving Pacific Northwest. The current recession and farm-to-table movement have taken the trend further still. “Just get a few chickens and you can feed yourself,” says AbuTalib of the Bronx’s Taqwa Community Farm. “He who controls your breadbasket controls your destiny.”

April 22, 2009

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photo sarazucker: happy earth day. here is a dress made of steamed artichoke leaves and kale, radicchio, and cabbage leaves. it was designed by ami goodheart. carry on. YUM.

sarazucker:

happy earth day. here is a dress made of steamed artichoke leaves and kale, radicchio, and cabbage leaves. it was designed by ami goodheart. carry on.

YUM.

April 22, 2009

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link Michael Pollan: "A Food Revolution in the Making, from Victory Gardens to the White House Lawn"

I’m creating an Urban Agriculture Study Group at the City University of New York (where I’m on the staff of a green building program) with a couple of crazy-passionate, very inspiring students.  One of them went off to Power Shift 2009 and came back excited to change the word through urban farming.  But he hadn’t even read Michael Pollan yet, so I set him to work.  Lesson One: Omnivore’s Dilemna.  (Eventually I hope to go on field trips with the group — maybe to visit my friends at the Queens County Farm Museum!).

I just emailed this HuffPo post to my students…

Resolarizing the food economy can support diversified farming and shorten the distance from farm to fork, shrinking the amount of fossil fuel in the American diet. A decentralized food system offers many other significant benefits: Food eaten closer to where it is grown is fresher and requires less processing, making it more nutritious, and whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience; regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks.

Here are few examples of how we could start:

  • Provide grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers’ markets.
  • Make food-safety regulations sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that small producers selling direct off the farm or at a farmers’ market are not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer.
  • Urge The U.S.D.A. to establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve and support the local food processors that remain.
  • Establish a Strategic Grain Reserve to prevent huge swings in commodity prices.
  • Create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce which would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed.

Link via Ms. Cathy.

April 22, 2009

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photo lauraemily: To continue my previous post on the impact of obesity, definitive studies have been published illustrating the significant carbon footprint obese individuals contribute… “The population with 40 percent obese people requires 19 percent more food energy for its total energy expenditure than the population with 3.5 percent obese people, the study showed. This 19 percent increase in food consumption translates into an increase of 270 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, the study said.”

lauraemily:

To continue my previous post on the impact of obesity, definitive studies have been published illustrating the significant carbon footprint obese individuals contribute…

“The population with 40 percent obese people requires 19 percent more food energy for its total energy expenditure than the population with 3.5 percent obese people, the study showed.

This 19 percent increase in food consumption translates into an increase of 270 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, the study said.”

April 20, 2009

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text

The “natural” artificial sweetener

“Stevia” is the common name for rebaudioside A, an artifical, no-calorie sweetener that is extracted from the leaves of the stevia plant.  Long popular in Japan, the FDA deemed it safe for use in food and drink this past December — after years of lobbying from “large food and drink manufacturers” who sensed ” an eager audience for a sugar substitute perceived as healthier than the rest,” the NYT reports.

Stevia is gaining popularity, thanks in part to bloggers like The Fitnessista, who champions whole food eating but uses stevia in everything from homemade almond milk to coffee. But what, really, seperates it from Splenda? Neither are things your grandmother would recognize as food (one of Michael Pollan’s rules for eating).

More on the marketing of stevia from the NYT article…

Stevia has one distinct advantage over all the rest. Because it comes from a plant, marketers can call it a natural sweetener. And that allows companies that have invested millions in new stevia products to tap into two powerful markets at once: natural ingredients and low-calorie products. […]

Two of the biggest backers [of stevia], Cargill and Whole Earth Sweetener Company, earlier this year began rolling out packets of stevia-based sweeteners, called Truvia and PureVia respectively. The extract is in the companies’ drinks, too. Among the new stevia products marketed as naturally sweetened are Sprite Green from Coca-Cola and Trop50, from the PepsiCo subsidiary Tropicana. It’s essentially half water and half orange juice doctored with stevia.

To underline their natural claims, stevia products come packaged in green.

April 16, 2009

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link U.S. shoppers hit meat counters as recession bites

sharingtime:

When the going gets tough, the tough eat things that destroy their bodies and the environment.

March 20, 2009

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video

Mark Bittman: “What’s wrong with what we eat” (via azspot)

“If you’re a progressive, if you’re driving a Prius, if you’re shopping green or looking for organic, you should probably be a semi-vegetarian,” Bittman says.

As I’ve written before, Bittman is one of my inspirations for drastically rethinking and reducing my poultry and meat consumption this year.  (I’ll only eat it if I know exactly where it comes from, and no more than twice a month.)

JOIN US!  You won’t miss it.  The meat I eat is yummier, and I appreciate every bite.

March 19, 2009

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link Where the Obesity Grows

Interesting article about the political connection between the obesity epidemic and our industrial agricultural system, starring Tom Vilsack, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, who calls his “the most important department in government,” and Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food.”

“All flesh is grass” says the scripture. Much of the too-ample flesh of Americans (three of five are overweight; one in five is obese) comes from corn, which is a grass. A quarter of the 45,000 items in the average supermarket contain processed corn. Fossil fuels are involved in planting, fertilizing, harvesting, transporting and processing the corn. America’s food industry uses about as much petroleum as America’s automobiles do.

March 8, 2009

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