Puck

A Journal of the Irrepressible

Archive for the ‘food’ Category

Kenya fishermen see upside to pirates: more fish

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In past years, illegal commercial trawlers parked off Somalia's coast and scooped up the ocean's contents. Now, fishermen on the northern coast of neighboring Kenya say, the trawlers are not coming because of pirates.

“There is a lot of fish now, there is plenty of fish. There is more fish than people can actually use because the international fishermen have been scared away by the pirates,” said Athman Seif, the director of the Malindi Marine Association.

via Kenya fishermen see upside to pirates: more fish.

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Written by Brian

January 10th, 2010 at 4:51 pm

Posted in agriculture, food, politics

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High Fructose Corn Sugar Is Bad New Study Proves

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For the first time, a study on humans proves what we’ve known for years: corn-derived fructose is bad for you.

“This is the first evidence we have that fructose increases diabetes and heart disease independently from causing simple weight gain,” said Kimber Stanhope, a molecular biologist who led the study. “We didn’t see any of these changes in the people eating glucose [natural sugar].”

A spokesperson for the processed food industry of course denies that HFCS is dangerous: “It makes no sense to highlight one single ingredient as a cause of obesity.”

More details in the Times of London online…

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Written by Brian

December 15th, 2009 at 2:03 pm

Posted in food

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Harper’s Foodies

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From this week’s Harper’s Weekly:

Chicago rats fed a diet of sausage, pound cake, bacon, cheesecake, and Ho Hos began to behave like rats addicted to heroin, consuming increasing amounts of food to feel satisfied and continuing to eat even when to do so meant that electric shocks were delivered to their tiny paws. When switched to healthful food (“the salad option”) the rats, which had become obese, their brains numbed by junk, simply refused to eat. A man in Iowa punched another man, who was ordering Mexican food, for being a zombie. Researchers from Oregon determined that ancient beavers did not eat trees, and a firm in New Jersey was distributing vaginal mints.

Subscribe to said Weekly by visiting this link.

The study on junk food addition in rats was reported recently in ScienceNews: “This is the most complete evidence to date that suggests obesity and drug addiction have common neurobiological underpinnings,” says study coauthor Paul Johnson of the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla.

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Written by Brian

October 27th, 2009 at 9:15 am

Posted in drugs, food

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Food Bills Coming Due

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A couple weeks ago I wrote about a couple pieces of federal legislation that folks were getting up in arms about, saying they would “ban organic farming.” As I pointed out, the bloggers writing about the bills were, at best, misreading and perhaps deliberately using scare tactics in order to stir up trouble, comments and links. The bills in question have spawned a netroots fever of apocalyptic (non)thinking which, as the Ethicurean points out, distract from the truly bad legislation floating around the Hill. Snip:

Perhaps the worst of the lot is HR 1332, Rep. Costa’s Safe FEAST Act of 2009, which is backed by the Big Ag group Western Growers. It would create a HACCP system for produce. (HACCP is the set of burdensome recordkeeping requirements credited with hastening the demise of many small-scale slaughter facilities.) It doesn’t take the size of operations into account. It would pay for inspections by charging fees to farms and processors and would hand the duty of inspection over to third-party certifiers. Because yeah, that’s worked so well for us to date.

Then there’s Rep. DeGette’s H.R. 814, which actually does mandate a National Animal Identification System, which we and lots of other people have major concerns about. And there’s H.R. 759, offered by Rep. Dingell, which requires traceability of food from farm to restaurants and requires that the recordkeeping be done electronically. It also charges fees to processors — small or large — for inspections.

None of these bills are good for small farmers, and I hope we might agree that they would all be worse than H.R. 875.

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Written by Brian

April 3rd, 2009 at 10:04 am

Posted in agriculture, food, politics

Could These Bills Ban Organic Farming or Farmers’ Markets?

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Megan Prusynski has an interesting, if not quite accurate, post on Planetsave this morning. Two bills, one in the Senate, the other in the House, seek to standardize a number of aspects of food production that, Prusynski claims, could jeopardize organic farming. She writes:

Provisions include mandatory registration and inspection for “any food establishment or foreign food establishment engaged in manufacturing, processing, packing, or holding food for consumption in the United States,” and sets standard practices such as minimums for fertilizer use. Any food that the agency deems “unsafe, adulterated or misbranded” can be seized and the food establishment or farm fined. It’s not clear how these foods will be deemed unsafe. The bills aim to industrialize farms, standardize farming practices, require registration and inspection for any one producing food, and make practices key to organic farming illegal. Read the rest of this entry »

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Written by Brian

March 10th, 2009 at 8:23 am

Posted in agriculture, food, politics

Peak Oil

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My friend B. wrote me this:

So I was reading the Bay Area Guardian, something I do exactly as regularly as I vote, and I ran across something that I thought might interest you. It seems San Francisco has a Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force to explore life after fossil fuels. Of course few take them seriously.

And I replied:

Do you mean that people locally don’t take the task force in SF seriously? Or don’t take post-oil seriously?

The peak oilers are sometimes hard to listen to because they’re so apocalyptically pessimistic. They see the energy packed into a hydrocarbon molecule and moan, What can possibly replace this? They don’t see anything on the shelf that can replace oil, so assume we’re all doomed. I do admire their historical analysis, tho, and I think Hubbert was right; well, he was right, US production peaked right when he said it would. A year or so ago the Saudi Minister of Energy said the planet was running out of oil and had to get ready. And now the King of Saudi Arabia has created a $10-billion endowment for a new university, sci and tech research, that will be a mini-kingdom unto itself in order to free it (and thus attract students and faculty) of Sharia, the heinous religious law of fundamentalist Islam. The king’s reasoning was explicit: Saudi Arabia won’t be an energy economy for much longer and needs to transform itself into a knowledge economy. Amen, brother. At last we agree on something. Read the rest of this entry »

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Written by Brian

June 18th, 2008 at 5:56 pm

Mushrooms, Molds, and Miracles

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review by Brian Charles Clark

Mushrooms. Molds, and Miracles
Lucy Kavaler
backinprint.com, 2007

Mushrooms, Molds, and Miracles by Lucy KavalerGod is fungi. God is the stuff of the web—the food web, the web of life, call it what you will—and without fungi, we’d be less than dead; we never would have existed—“we” meaning every living thing on the planet. Fungi are everywhere, and everywhere essential, and what is god if not the ultimate mixmaster, the one who breaks it all down so the big bang beat can begin again?

“The process of decay,” Lucy Kavaler writes, “is… essential in making room on this small planet for new living things.” Kavaler wrote that line just a couple years after Carson’s Silent Spring was published. “The development of life on earth is related to the evolution of fungi.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Written by Brian

September 2nd, 2007 at 10:18 pm

The Battle against Science

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I just stumbled across a truly bizarre blog called cfact. There, Dennis T. Avery (author of the wacko Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic) counters a report on the dangers of fast food with the suggestion that we “chew on some real danger foods.” Avery writes, with seeming ignorance of basic nutrition science, “There’s a new children’s book out [Avery does not name the book, always a good tactic when you want to create a diversion], telling kids that vicious food-mongers are trying to make them obese with fast food. That’s such a pathetic scare! Any food can make you fat if you eat too much.” It’s hard to imagine getting fat on lettuce, say, which requires more energy to digest than it contains, but let it go. Here’s the real nutso suggestion by Mr. Avery: eat ergot fungus! Now there’s a real “danger food”! This isn’t even comparing apples to oranges, which are both foods. Ergot, need I remind you, is not a food. Talk about a diversionary tactic: spew out a long, misinformed “history” of St. Anthony’s Fire and avoid talking about killer transfats in Micky D’s poisonous offerings. Read the rest of this entry »

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Written by Brian

August 29th, 2006 at 2:19 pm

Follow the Money

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For several years we’ve been hearing reports that moderate consumption of alcoholic beverages is a “heart healthy” activity. And for almost as long I’ve been saying, Follow the money. If you trace the funding for such studies back to their sources you find the wine industries of France and California footing the bill. Now it looks as though I’ve been right all along. “All those health benefits of moderate drinking may be based on nothing but a common methodological error in the studies, a meta-analysis suggested,” reports Medpage Today along with numerous other sources. A “common methodological error”? Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics? When the wine industry is footing the bill for data analysis the error is not merely methodological, which is far too neutral a term. This is the spinning of data to support an industry. Various vested interests–grape growers, wine makers, retail outlets, and especially the federal government of the United States–want you to believe that alcoholic beverages are somehow “healthy.” The tobacco industry would like you to believe the same thing about cigarettes and, historically, that industry has engaged in the same sort of data spin as the wine industry has been pulling for the past decade or so. All of this is designed to divert our dizzy little short-attention-span minds from the obvious: alcohol is a dangerous drug–but it’s legal. Meanwhile, the planet’s only safe intoxicant is demonized throughout the world. It’s time to call the bull-shitters’ bluff: make alcohol illegal and legalize cannabis.

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Written by Brian

March 31st, 2006 at 1:55 pm

Posted in drugs, food

Avant Spud

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Potato chip bar - it's from the future!

Still waiting for the City of the Future? Look no further! In 1961 the American Potato Journal published this photo of the food of the future: the potato-chip bar! Get a dose of salt and starch to fuel the jetpack-powered business of you day.

 

“The potato chip bar is made by crushing chips and molding them by pressure into a shape and size resembling a candy bar. Such bars can be shipped economically without the protective packaging normally required for potato chips, and their flavor and crunchy texture give them distinct possibilities for commercialization” (Am Potato J 38:10 [1961] 340).

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Written by Brian

January 14th, 2006 at 1:13 pm