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.
Click image for a larger version.
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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.
The Economist has a great special this week about "The End of cheap Food" (essay and an article). Highly recommended.
There are several forces at work:
One is simply demand and supply. For years farmers in Europe have been over subsidized and told to use their lands to overproduce even more food. Now with need these extra capacities back. Since the production of biofuels is so heavily subsidized as well - demand has made it for example more lucrative to sell wheat for fuel production instead of making pasta (here some background on the state of Wheat production worldwide).
Most of all food production is distorted: for decades now poorer countries with an agricultural base had no chance of competing against European and American farmers - because they are heavily subsidized. Sometimes local production has been so damaged by the price difference that they had to close - so these poor countries actually had to import food they could have easily produced themselves.
What we need is curbed up production in all countries, less subsidies and more sensible production. It makes no sense to transport milk from Europe to China. That’s a lot of fuel wasted - fuel which gets more and more expensive.
In nature the fight for food and survival is a tough one. That is why huge amounts of easy to get food are so devastating to us humans. We were made to survive on little food, trying to burn as few calories searching for more. How many calories have you burned to hunt your last steak? How much physical work is left in our life’s?
Humanity isn’t built for office work, fast food and extreme couching.
One of the foundations of our modern lifestyle are fridges (even the ones without Internet access). Preserving food has always been a hard task - before fridges they used dark, cold cellars and for a brief period of time ice blocks delivered to your home.
A fridge is such a practical thing: just open the door and stuff your goodies inside. Done!
The fridge and cold warehouse allowed easier transport and mass storange of persihable goods and layed also a foundation for mass delivery and consumption of fresh veggies, fish and meat from far away places. Frozen food can last an eternity compared to normal storange.
But fridges are also responsible for fast food and so called convinience food: quick and dirty dishes without the pleasure to shop for daily needs, selecting stuff from your personal dealer and preparing it yourself (a typical mom job) …
Check also: the webfridge project
I guess only the complicated western mind could develop such a crazy system of eating utensils? While other cultures are happy with a a knife, spoon, some bread and maybe chopsticks to pick up their food - Europe indulged into a complicated system of silverware.
From Wikipedia:
Cutlery refers to any hand utensil used in preparing, serving, and especially eating food. It is more usually known as silverware or flatware in the United States, where cutlery can have the more specific meaning of knives and other cutting instruments. This is probably the original meaning of the word. Since silverware suggests the presence of silver, the term tableware has come into use.
The major items of cutlery in the western world are the knife, fork and spoon. Traditionally, good quality cutlery was made from silver (hence the U.S. name), though steel was always used for more utilitarian knives, and pewter was used for some cheaper items, especially spoons. From the nineteenth century, Electroplated Nickel Silver (EPNS) was used as a cheaper substitute; nowadays, most cutlery, including quality designs, is made from stainless steel. Plastic cutlery is made for disposable use, and is frequently used in fast food or take-away outlets and provided with airline meals.
Two forms of utensil combining the functionality of various pairs of cutlery are the spork (spoon / fork) and knork (knife / fork). Cutlery gets its name from the term for a person skilled in making knives, a cutler. The Worshipful Company of Cutlers was one of the London livery companies, reflecting the importance of this trade in the Middle Ages.
Cutlery gained prominence during the Middle Ages.
Ok, it began with fast food and pizza restaurants. Grabbing a bite in our hectic days makes sense, having the same boring food all over the world doesn’t.
Then came the Coffee Shops to give us the extra needed caffeine kick and sugar rush - plus some free wireless access. Well, still makes sense - although I hate the standard Ikea-Starbucks nesting instinct that’s developing globally.
But who needs a cell phone store - one for each provider - on every highstreet? It’s not that we need a daily supply of ‘phonettes’, batteries or ‘call minutes’?! We maybe upgrade our phone once a year or change our contracts maybe every two?
These shops are there mostly for presence, marketing and showing off their brand. I rather have some good old sandwich shops or some other specialized merchant that sells anything BUT a cell phone, a burger or a Latte.
Our inner cities have lost their unique mix of local shops and retailers. Almost all over the planet the big shopping centers offer the same crap from the same
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