We are currently reaching Peak Oil.

Less Oil means higher prices for Petrol and Fertilizers.

Expensive Petrol and Fertilizers will raise Food Prices and lower overall production.

Less Food means Starvation.

Starvation will reduces the amount of Humans.

Less Humans means less Industry and Farming.

Less Industry and Farming will reduce CO2 and Climate Change.

Global Grain stocks are already in decline and food prices have skyrocketed in recent years (especially for poor nations).

We are already on our way to solve climate change …

The organic movement has infiltrated our minds and told us for years that all those pesticides on "normal" apples are bad and dangerous for us.

The truth us that you hardly find truly untreated & un-sprayed apples in organic markets.

Most unsprayed apple would have very ugly looking brown spots and often a peel – not the healthy and shiny natural look we are used to.

Many organic orchards use copper spray to keep their apples in shape. Copper is not a pesticide, but certainly not beneficial for humans either and our water supply.

Mass Food Production is a tricky thing and we might have to accept that almost all forms of mass production will put a strain on nature.

Who do we like to eat saints? Is that a weird leftover from the holy communion or simply greedy consumerism?

Let’s be honest: isn’t Christmas the best time to be a cookie monster? Yummy!

Christmas – like so many festivals – is a clone of the winter solstice celebrations.

The winter solstice is an important moment for any primitive agricultural society: the days get longer and spring isn’t far off. It also is an important date, it helps you to figure out when to till your fields and start sowing your seeds – especially when you have no clocks and internet.

So celebrating the winter solstice is important and it’s no surprise why people stuffed themselves with yummy food (if it was available). Those yummy and calorie rich treats also are meant to help you to master the rest of the winter.

But today we hardly suffer from no food in harsh and long winters. You can even have typical European summer fruits like Strawberries and exotic bananas all year round.

There is hardly any hunger or scarceness these days in rich countries. We consume HUGE amounts of sugar and other treats all year long.

So why not go sugar & treat free until Christmas to REALLY get into the spirit and celebrating that day by eating something you don’t have EVERY day?

Click image for a bigger snap.

We humans really eat anything, it doesn’t matter how poisonous, dangerous, tiny or big the animal is. We have already eaten or better say extinct several species.

But our appetite for "normal" (like domesticated animals like chicken, pigs & cows) as well as exotic species is unsustainable.

In the end we eat ourselves or at least destroy our host that is feeding us.

Economist.com: Too many people?

The Economist has special debates on it’s websites, which are brilliant! Not the usual flame wars and hate speech you find in normal internet “discussions”.

Their debates run over several days and experts deliver great arguments for both sides.

This debate is highly recommended (but already closed).

Today I wanted to buy some packaged sliced salmon. It looked good from the outside and wasn’t cheap either. Out of habit I checked the content description. It contained the obvious stuff like salt, sugar, anti-oxidants … and pork!?!

I understand that industrial food production relies on many chemicals to improve it’s products and make food last longer.

But pork shouldn’t be in my salmon. Thankfully the producer was honest enough to put it on it’s label – something many of his competitor won’t do.

In recent months there have been several scandals here in Germany about artificially stretched bacon and cheese – so consumers always beware!

I don’t put all the blame on the food industry: consumers want huge amount of classy food for discount prices. It’s no surprise for me that the industry uses many “techniques” to improve food to make it look & taste great, but sell it at ever low prices.

BBC News: A storm brews over food, water & power

Europeans, Americans and China are in a new land grab for food security. They all buy huge patches of farmland in Africa and other places to produce for their own people.

Many poor nations sell their produce to rich nations to bolster their finances, while their own population goes hungry. The rich once again take away food from the poor big style.

Cooking shows have always been a part of the TV diet. But in recent years cooking shows – crossed with the madness of reality tv and gaming shows – has become a whole need breed of televised craziness.

I think the whole madness started with Iron Chef:

It was TOTALLY over the top and removed from “normal” cooking. It pleased poor people as well as gastro snobs.

Programs like Top Chef and Hell’s kitchen are often rude and more like a soap than a cooking show. It’s no longer about food, but just competition and kicking someone’s arse.

It all Big Brother these days: people watching other people living and doing their job. Social porn at it’s worst and nevertheless very successful, because everybody can relate to it.

Where are all the TV shows were you could learn something or get inspired? Where are the TV shows that show the better side of humanity instead of nasty competitions and slimy fights? Don’t we have already enough of that?

But I guess such shows are a relief to many suppressed viewers, because they can “identify” with those onscreen bastards and act out their fantasies while wasting their lives in front of the telly …

So the guy in the yellow jersey gets a banana and all the other guys have to chase that guy to win?

The Tour de France is an odd race indeed!

A lot of convenience food is basically repacking production lower quality production surplus to look more appealing to the consumer.

With Fish Finger (ever seen a fish with hands?) are like chicken nuggets or any other fried and battered / breaded: you don’t see what you eat.

Till the mid 1950’s Britain and several European Countries still were on food rations. During the war years people got used to live on small portions.

With the "Wirtschaftswunder" more and new food arrived: convenience and processed food containing loads of sugar, fat and salt. People loved all that rich stuff after so many years of living lean and mean.

This was the beginning of the obesity epidemic we are suffering now.

Just like whales and seals I like to add additional fat to my body to protect me against the winter cold. Hey, I take any lame excuse to stuff yummy food into my belly!

World Food production relies heavily on oil for fertilizer, production and transport. So with the spike in oil prices food become for many poor people unaffordable. Starvation and malnutrition was the immediate consequence for these fellow humans.

So each time food is wasted, oil is wasted.

Conservation should be a commandment for every human on this planet. Especially since overpopulation on one side and the destruction of the environment seriously limits the food supply.

So if you throw away food, you are not killing poor little babies in Africa – but you are certainly wasting a valuable resource.

People in rich countries don’t have to live total frugal, but some efforts to cut down on waste should be made anyway.

We are used that the Americans are the most wasteful and resource devouring nation on earth. But China is currently overtaking the Americans being number one in so many things: pollution, energy and food consumption.

China’s hunger for concrete, oil, milk and so many other commodities has raised prices and shifted the markets focus to Asia. (India’s rising middle class is also developing a growing appetite.)

It certainly is a great opportunity for other nations to supply the needs of China, but especially with the growing environmental problems the Asian huge hunger for almost everything is more a threat than an opportunity.

But neither the west, nor the far east are really willing to slow down or make serious efforts to cut down their energy, pollution and food appetites.

China defends it’s hunger with the necessity of upgrading it’s vast country up to western standards. And how can the west demand from China not to modernize?

Ah, I finally get it …

Telegrapgh.co.uk: Photographing meals ‘could help weight loss’

Slimmers began to eat healthier food when they were asked to take a picture of what they were eating, scientists found.

The pictures appear to have concentrated the dieters’s mind at just the right time, before they were about to eat, the researchers who carried out the study believe.

Photographs were also more effective at encouraging volunteers to watch what they ate than traditional written food diaries.

To test if encouraging slimmers to photograph everything they eat might also encourage them to change their diet, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison asked

43 people to record what they ate for one week in pictures as well as in words.

When the volunteers were later quizzed the photo diary appeared more effective at encouraging them to change their eating habits to more healthy alternatives.

The photographs also acted as a powerful reminder of any snacking binges, the researchers found.

If this helps I’ll make even TWO snaps of every bite I’ll take.

By the way: the Mousse and the Sacher Torte were brilliant – but so far I have experienced no weightloss from the photos I have taken.

Movie / 97 minutes / English

“Soylent Green is people!” 

A great movie!

Since we are becoming the massively dominant species on this planet we should consider not just killing each other – but eating each other as well. Consider the rise in food prices and all these fat people around. They would serve other people as excellent meals!

More? Soylent Green @ Wikipedia

Animals should invade our habitat and eat away our resources – just like what we do to them.

I think that would raise a lot of awareness.

Bears occasionally do that by accident – and then we humans panic a lot. Apes are notorious food thieves in Africa and India – we should let them loose in the US and Europe. Especially fat westerners will appreciate less food on their table and the extra exercise fighting off large crowds of Baboons.

Producing meat uses many primary food sources like wheat, maize or grain – and also oil for additional transport. Plus meat always needs to be cold – and therefore needs even more energy for refrigeration.

All livestock farts and produces loads of greenhouses gasses – and that’s actually as much bad gas as produced by cars.

I have no problems eating animals. Many of them can be very yummy. But I do hate animal cruelty against pets and "food". There is NO reason to cause these creatures any unnecessary pain, even when we kill them to eat them.

I especially despise people who buy animals as pets and simply "dispose" them when they are bored with them. Next time buy a Tamagotchi instead – in that case you waste only the batteries life instead of a real one.

BBC News: Biscuits ‘key’ to clinching business deals

About four out of five UK businesses believe the type of biscuit they serve to potential clients could clinch the deal or make it crumble, a survey says.

The outcome of a meeting could be influenced by the range and quality of biscuits, according to 1,000 business professionals quizzed by Holiday Inn.

The chocolate digestive was deemed to make the best impression followed by shortbread and Hob Nobs.

Lawyers were most impressed by good boardroom biccies, the survey added.

One has to wonder: a.) how predictable we humans are and b.) what kind of stupid research our scientists do.

But nevertheless – inviting your client or business partner for a cookie or a nice lunch or a hot brothel – physical pleasures and gratifications have always helped to close a deal.

BBC News: Sharks swim closer to extinction

Sharks are not breeding like cattle – which means we eat them faster than they can breed.

Excellent – so we now longer need to worry about being eaten by sharks since we simply ate them.

But I am also pretty sure we will figure out that shark are an essential part of OUR mutual ecosystem – because they are one of the oldest species around (from Wikipedia):

Evidence for the existence of sharks extends back over 450–420 million years, into the Ordovician period, before land vertebrates existed and before many plants had colonised the continents. All that has been recovered from the first sharks are some scales. The oldest shark teeth are from 400 million years ago. The first sharks looked very different from modern sharks. The majority of the modern sharks can be traced back to around 100 million years ago.

Similar to bees or ants  – sharks serve a very important function as hunter and "cleaner" in our oceans.

Sakurako Kitsa has posted an amazing collection of Japanese Bento boxes.

Click image for a larger version.

Click image for a larger version.

Click image for a larger version.  

The word subtle or normal doesn’t apply here. Orangina is a nice soft drink around here – nothing special . But I love this advertising campaign: it’s the right amount of surrealism and sexism combined with loads of yellow and orange. And how can anything orange be bad?

Wow, isn’t it a shame that all these huge organization, these gazillions of governments and agencies didn’t do anything to PREVENT the current crisis?

I remember several articles last year warning that the bio fuel boom will drive food prices up and that our wheat and rice reserves are emptying fast.

Most governments are not spending too much brainpower to prevent such predictable human disasters. What a shame!

Here is a HIGHLY recommended article about the current food production and distribution system and how it needs to be adopted for a better future.

Worldwide food prices are on the rise – sometimes up to 20-30%! While people in rich countries will still be able to fill their bellies – in many poorer nations many will face hunger. In China and the Philippines for example Governments tried to reassure consumers that they won’t face any shortages and prices won’t continue to sky rocket. Famous last words.

And it’s not just developing and poor nations facing problems. In Italy the price for pasta has risen up to 30%. And pasta is certainly not a luxury food.

Have we hit the “sound barrier” for human (over) population? Is the current industrial food production sustainable with higher and higher oil prices and more and more serious damage to the environment?

Maybe we are facing food riot?

Rice is the most important food source, but climate change is fucking rice production up (from the New Scientist):

Rice is arguably the world’s most important food source and helps feed about half the globe’s people. But yields in many areas will drop as the globe warms in future years, a review of studies on rice and climate change suggests.

The poorest parts of the world, including Africa, will probably be hardest hit, the study says. Rice harvests already need to increase by about a third just to keep up with global population growth.

Predicting how a changing climate will affect crop yields is notoriously difficult. Temperature, carbon dioxide concentration and ozone levels all have a big impact on growth. Yet most studies look at just one of these factors, making it difficult to know what the combined effect will be.

It is also hard to know whether results from experiments in greenhouses with artificial climates will hold true in the real world. But when the evidence from some 80 different studies is combined, the outlook is bleak, says Elizabeth Ainsworth of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

In regions where the average daily temperatures are expected to rise above 30ºC, rice yields will start to fall off, and the impact will get worse as the temperature increases.

The drop in yield caused by rising temperatures can be counteracted by the boost to photosynthesis provided by the increased levels of carbon dioxide driving climate change. But when Ainsworth pooled the studies, she found that effect is not strong enough to counteract the stress plants suffer at high temperatures.

Harvests will also be reduced by rising ground-level ozone concentrations. They are caused by nitrogen oxides (NOX) from power stations that catalyse the formation of ozone in warm and sunny conditions. Ainsworth’s review found that ozone concentrations of around 60 parts per billion, which have already being recorded on farms in China and the United States, cause yields to drop by 14%.

Experiments on the effect of ozone using greenhouses containing artificial atmospheres are still crude, so other rice researchers are urging caution in interpreting Ainsworth’s results. For example, many experiments use fixed levels of ozone, but outdoors levels fluctuate daily and plants can use the low points to recover from brief periods of high concentrations.

Just because one species thinks you are cute doesn’t mean you can’t be lunch for another one. There is safety in numbers, but not in cuteness …

Thanks to our technical inventions we can prevail against big predators. But we still haven’ won against the really small ones: bacteria and viruses are still the biggest threat for humans. And boy do they love to eat and infect us!

Believe it or not: the UN has called 2008 the International Year of the Potato. Sounds ridiculous? But it isn’t!

The potato is one of the worlds leading crops – just behind wheat, rice and maize. But compared to the other three the potato is easier to grow and sprouts in a wider range of climates. And the potato delivers more calories on a smaller patch of land. Especially important these days, because of overpopulation we need to squeeze as much calories out of the ground as we can.

Here are some more interesting facts. Personally I think the potato is the best thing that came from South America – ever!

More? The official International Year of the Potato site

Lick on that Holy Spirit! Nothing is sacred these days, but it least this tasteless stuff is pretty yummy. This dead man is easy to swallow … another Jesus please!

But is this chocolate Jesus any different what Catholics do during their service: they eat his Body and drink his Blood.

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution we have squeezed more and more yield out of the ground – and poured more and more dirty chemical into it.

Soil quality and pollution is a serious problem in almost any country. Plus climate change also has a strong influence on soil quality.

Our crops suck the nutrients out of the soil, it takes nature some time to ‘recharge’ the ground. We invented new way to speed up the process by using fertilizers – which include oil as one of it’s ingredient. So food production and oil are directly linked – not just for transportation.

This is taken from a great article from Dale Allen Pfeiffer:

In the United States, 400 gallons of oil equivalents are expended annually to feed each American (as of data provided in 1994).⁷ Agricultural energy consumption is broken down as follows:

• · 31% for the manufacture of inorganic fertilizer
• · 19% for the operation of field machinery
• · 16% for transportation
• · 13% for irrigation
• · 08% for raising livestock (not including livestock feed)
• · 05% for crop drying
• · 05% for pesticide production
• · 08% miscellaneous

The modern way of chemical farming seems unsustainable to many – organic farming is better for the soil to ‘recharge’ itself and yield better produce.

So we face a serious combination of problems here: lower soil quality calls for more fertilizers – which will increase production prices, oil is already expensive so more fertilizer means more oil will be needed for food production – which again raises global oil prices.

Feed me loads of oil! Feed me yummy soil!

A small side note: we also use loads of fertilizer to produce biofuels – so in a matter of speaking we put oil in the ground to grow oil. Sure we get more out of the ground than we put in – but it is still an odd mechanism.

Since oil is a finite resource we should seriously push and make organic farming mandatory. We need sustainable ways of producing HUGE amounts of food for all six billion of us.

According to new research 30% of our planets usable land is used for growing food for humans. This is a HUGE number – I didn’t expect to be so high.

So it’s no surprise that so many species go extinct since we are eating up all the space and create more and more farmland to produce food and now biofuels. Plus we need space for our exploding cities and infrastructure …

Once again I think the real problem here is overpopulation. Too many humans needing too much space.

Fish and Beef are a luxury. It takes big amounts of primary food sources like wheat to produce the same amount of calories in meat.

So instead of eating such luxuries items every day, we should change our habit and ignore the 99¢ burgers with fries and diet coke – and get some apples or pasta instead.

The way we produce food is simply stupid. We ship our calories back and forth across the globe – often several times, because one industrial food processing service might be cheaper at the other end of the world. But all this shipping costs huge amounts of energy and causes lots of pollution.

Produce locally, ship locally, eat locally. That would be sustainable. Today be can grow almost all exotic foods even in cold countries – and off season.

The plate is a strange technology. It’s not a practical bowl to hold liquids. It’s also not as practical as a cutting board for … uh … cutting stuff.

But it’s a great hybrid of both ideas. The higher borders hold back liquids from running from the flat surface like a bowl – and you actually can cut stuff on a plate, which is unpractical in a bowl.

About 10.000 years our ancestors made a huge leap forward. For thousands of years we had lived as hunter-gatherers – happily stuffing anything down our throats we could find. But this kind of lifestyle was harsh and food rather unpredictable.

By settling down and cultivating grasses like wheat all that changed. Compared to all other foods available at that time wheat or better say grain can be stored for year without going stale. Compared to collected veggies, fruit or meat that is a huge advantage.

And wheat can be used to produce more wheat. So a whole new production system developed around wheat. Humble dwelling developed into villages and cities. Additional land was transformed into farmland. Farming allowed longer and permanent settlement, since it made sense to use the same fertile fields again and again.

To produce 1 kg of beef you need to feed 8 kg of wheat to the animal. Plus you need extra water, care and transportation to get the process of fattening your lifestock rolling.

Eating meat was always a luxury – except for the last 50 years in industrialized nations. If the oil prices continues to climb higher and higher it might be a luxury again.