Food Choices for Healthy People and a Healthy Planet

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Dietitians’ trade group partners with junk food industry

In Food Politics, Good News,
  • Posted on March 23, 2013
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dietitians for prof integrity

Uh oh, food politics again. Here is more proof that we, individual citizens, need to become our own food safeguards. We knew that the FDA and USDA are heavily influenced by meat, dairy, and grain lobbies (and that’s putting it politely), but it’s sad to learn that organizations that we thought were on our side may not be so innocent.

My friend Michele Simon, who runs the watchdog organization Eat Drink Politics, has found that the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is way too friendly with major food industries. According to her report, the Academy accepts money from ConAgra (which makes ReddiWip cream in a can, the heavily salted Marie Callender’s products, etc), the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (which sued Oprah Winfrey for daring to say she wouldn’t eat another hamburger), Kellogg’s, Mars, and the National Dairy Council.

If you’re a dietitian or nutritionist, you can get continuing education credits by taking a course from Coca Cola (where you will learn that sugar is not a threat to children), Kraft (which makes a cereal that is 55% sugar), Nestle, and others.

Maybe we should not be surprised, then, that the Academy has not yet endorsed important public health measures, such as taxing sodas and labeling genetically modified foods.

But as always, there’s good news just around the corner. Disgusted by this unhealthy partnership, a group of dietitians has recently formed Dietitians for Professional Integrity.

I’m happy to report that, according to food activist Ocean Robbins, over 500 dietitians joined the group – within two days of its launch.


Eat your package, with gusto

In Food to Try, Good News,
  • Posted on March 15, 2013
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sqrlcone lg

Nature gives us some foods that come in their own packaging – apples, walnuts, bananas, coconuts. You can probably think of some more. Humans have also created some edible packaging, most memorably the ice cream cone. Filmy cling wrap made out of vegetables has been in development for years (I wrote about it in 2002 and again in this space last year), though I haven’t seen any in the market yet.

In another twist, edible plants are being turned into packaging to cushion electronics for shipping.  Let’s just hope we don’t reverse that trend and start eating iphones….

A neat website called fastcoexist.com, a goldmine of interesting ideas, highlighted a coffee cup that is a cookie you can eat after you’ve finished your beverage. It’s not in production yet, but go here for a photo.

OR you could make your own edible cup. An unnamed culinary genius turned muffin tins over, draped bread or cookie dough over the protruding bulge, and voila! Remove from your oven a set of concave cookies, all ready to be filled with ice cream or quiche or whatever is your personal indulgence. See a neat photo here. 


Eat your package, with gusto

In Food to Try, Good News,
  • Posted on March 15, 2013
  • Author: ,
  • Comments: Comments Off on Eat your package, with gusto


sqrlcone lg

Nature gives us some foods that come in their own packaging – apples, walnuts, bananas, coconuts. You can probably think of some more. Humans have also created some edible packaging, most memorably the ice cream cone. Filmy cling wrap made out of vegetables has been in development for years (I wrote about it in 2002 and again in this space last year), though I haven’t seen any in the market yet.

In another twist, edible plants are being turned into packaging to cushion electronics for shipping.  Let’s just hope we don’t reverse that trend and start eating iphones….

A neat website called fastcoexist.com, a goldmine of interesting ideas, highlighted a coffee cup that is a cookie you can eat after you’ve finished your beverage. It’s not in production yet, but go here for a photo.

OR you could make your own edible cup. An unnamed culinary genius turned muffin tins over, draped bread or cookie dough over the protruding bulge, and voila! Remove from your oven a set of concave cookies, all ready to be filled with ice cream or quiche or whatever is your personal indulgence. See a neat photo here. 


Surprising place for progress in food sustainability

In Excerpt from Book, Good News, In the News,
  • Posted on March 12, 2013
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fast food lg

I’ve long supported an inclusive and incremental approach to environmental change, which I would summarize this way: Applaud positive steps made by individuals and businesses, while being wary of greenwash and false advertising. Look to like-minded people for support and ideas, but make the effort to seek, evaluate, and support progress made by people and companies you otherwise suspect. Imagine a world that is clean, safe, and sustainable, but accept that it will take decades to undo the destruction that the industrial revolution began three centuries ago. Be willing to look beyond stereotypes, seek common ground, and praise small steps. Don’t expect perfection, but strive for improvement. Relinquish the temptation to cast ourselves as heroes and everyone else as villains or sloths. Keep hoping.

This philosophy comes into sharp focus when one contemplates a recent E Magazine article which summarized environmental progress being made by the poster child of corporate evil, the food chain McDonalds.

Wait! Keep reading! The corporate fast-food giant has initiatives on energy, packaging, waste reduction, recycling, and more. You can investigate more here.

And get this: last year McDonald’s partnered with well-known genuine environmental groups to identify “Planet Champions” within the corporation’s worldwide reach. “The selection committee voted for projects and included representatives from McDonald’s as well as Business for Social Responsibility, Ceres, Conservation International, and World Wildlife Fund.” The highlighted parties did things in their local region like improving waste management, calculating ways to reduce carbon use, building the first LEED gold building in the country, and more.

As I wrote in The Green Foodprint, “There is hope for our food system. Determined groups and individuals have stopped some of industry’s worst tactics and even turned some businesses around. It’s not good to have a giant against you, but if you can get the giant on your side, you’re in luck.”


Mushrooms are beautiful in these videos

In Good News, Toxins and Pesticides,
  • Posted on March 8, 2013
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compost

Time-lapse photography is a wonderful device, letting us humans escape our own time-bound world to perceive life as experienced by slow-moving creatures, and to marvel at the stars wheeling above us.  I’ve found some remarkable videos of mushrooms going through their growth period. Click here, here, and here, and enjoy!

Paul Stamets is a world-renowned mushroom expert (or mycologist, to use the scientific term). He has spent decades researching ways mushrooms can (in his term) “save the world.” Sound like an exaggeration? He works in numerous areas that should interest all of us, First, medicinal mushrooms that create antibiotics and fight flu viruses. Second, bioremediation (using living organisms to clean up our chemical and radiation messes). In six weeks, a mushroom-inoculated pile of diesel and petroleum waste turned into hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms. Third, repelling pests such as termites. There’s even more, and you can see it here.

The most memorable thing he says in this talk is this: “The Earth invented the computer Internet for its own benefit.” (That is, to make it possible for people to communicate to save the earth. As you and I are doing right now!). Isn’t it mind-blowingly fun to look at ourselves not as the top creatures, but as partners?

I’m no mushroom expert, and I started this article to show you the magical videos. But if even part of what Stamets has found about the power of mushrooms is true, maybe there’s hope for people and planet.


Amazing, creative idea to save world’s fish

In Good News, In the News,
  • Posted on February 9, 2013
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fishswarm2

So you’ve been wondering how to save the world’s sea life from being fished to extinction. And maybe you’ve been wondering where to invest some money, what with interests rates practically underwater.

Do I have an answer for you!

Some investors have launched a contest – with real cash prizes – to encourage people in the global fishing industry (which, by the way, annually amounts to some $390 billion) to create ways to make the industry sustainable. Translation: how not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Personally, my contribution to this problem is simply not to eat fish (or any other seafood or landfood animals), but since millions of people do eat fish, I think the story is worth sharing.

The contest is called Fish 2.0 and those who enter get to rub elbows with venture capitalists looking to fund creative ideas at a two-day event this coming November. I’ve been to a similar event held by Slow Money, where creative food entrepreneurs got to pitch their ideas to moneyed folks, and it was inspiring to see ideas that could help the environment develop in front of my eyes.

David Bank, one of the organizers, explains it in more detail in this Huffington Post blog.  Fish 2.0 isn’t the only such initiative: the David and Lucile Packard Foundation offers Future of Fish, which also helps entrepreneurs, such as Robert Terry of Palo Alto, whose startup is developing fishing gear that could reduce bycatch (killing sea creatures –including dolphins and turtles –that the fishers don’t want and throw back into the sea dead or dying).

Dolphins Jumping

It’s encouraging that some people are seeing the danger and making (and investing in) long-term plans to save the sea life of the world.


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