Musings on sustainable food systems, agriculture vs. agroecology, and more!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rgaqwFPU7cc] This entertaining video (originally highlighted by Buzzfeed) shows what 2,000 calories looks like in a variety of foods. Why 2,000 calories? Because that is the average recommended daily caloric need of a person to maintain their weight, and what the calculations on food labels (referring to the percentage of daily value) are based on. … Continue reading How Much Are 2,000 Calories?
The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) recently wrote two blog posts about one of their papers called “The Roles of Livestock in Developing Countries“, in which their authors argue that the livestock sector needs to be studied and assessed in a much more disaggregated manner in order to acknowledge the roles and impacts of livestock … Continue reading Livestock: The Good, the Bad, and the Facts
Continuing with our mini-series, after our first installment, let’s turn to a buzzword that has gotten a lot of attention in the last years: grass-fed and/or pasture-raised animal products. What is the label’s motto/what does it stand for? The idea of grass-fed ruminants and pasture-raised other animals is that this production method is much more … Continue reading Labels Unveiled: Grass-Fed and Pasture-Raised
Chances are, you would be hard-pressed to place nations such as Micronesia, Kiribati, Nauru, the Marshall Islands, Palau, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and Tuvalu on a map. However, these eight tiny Pacific island-states might be decisive in protecting one of the last remaining healthy tuna fisheries in the world, as this article reports.
In the end, the strongest economic argument for an aggressive response to climate change is not the much trumpeted windfall of green jobs. Its the fact that the economy won’t function very well in a world full of droughts, hurricanes and heat waves. David Leonhardt on the need for decisive political action to tackle climate … Continue reading In the end, the…
A friend of mine sent me a link to this paper titled “Ready-to-use food-allocation policy to reduce the effects of childhood undernutrition in developing countries” – originally more as a “look at what weird things get published” link, but as I read through the abstract, it got me thinking…
The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings. Masanobu Fukoaka
Happy Easter! Ok, this might only be food policy in the most removed sense, but I discovered shocking news the other day, and it is extremely topical today: Did you know that chocolate surprise eggs (such as the ones produced by Kinder) are outlawed in the United States? Apparently, the sale and import of the … Continue reading The Legality of Kinder Surprise Eggs…
I was fascinated by this blog post by the blog “Food Governance“, which refers to and summarizes the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food’s report on his mission to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).