I'm leaving town next week for a while and have been squirreling these away, but winter is definitely over. So here is a Smörgåsbord for Food and Faith blog readers. Eat up.
Ice
cream crisis as bees buzz off
The collapse of US honeybee colonies this year is set to devastate America's multi-billion dollar agriculture and food industries. For the first time, individual businesses have stepped up to give money to try to discover its cause and eradicate it. London Guardian, England.
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Organic
food may be less expensive
Liana Hoodes works for the National Campaign for
Sustainable Agriculture and has grown food organically in the Hudson Valley
(New York) for well over 20 years. She responded to a recent syndicated news
column that dismissed the value of purchasing organically grown food. Writing
in the Times Herald-Record, Hoodes explained,
"Recent long-term studies at the Rodale Institute have shown that organic soils are more resistant to both drought and floods, and yields in most products are equal or better in organic. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that worldwide average yield of all organic products are 130 percent that of conventional. A recent UNFAO symposium suggests that organic agriculture may indeed help feed the world, through efficient energy use, lower inputs, and greater diversity... Given these facts, a true cost-benefit analysis -- where all the costs of our food are taken into account -- may find organic the least expensive alternative."
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New
international Ecological Footprint Quiz
If you've taken the Quiz before, take it again-the quiz now shows the benefits of sustainability choices (like purchasing carbon offsets or buying local) that were not part of the old quiz, and a dramatic rise in humanity's ecological overshoot of the Earth's biological capacity. The quiz also has interactive features like a floating tally box that displays your carbon, food, housing, and goods and services footprints as you answer each question.
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Link
Between Local Food Environments and Obesity and Diabetes
On April 29, 2008 the California Center for Public Health Advocacy (CCPHA), the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, and PolicyLink released Designed for Disease: The Link Between Local Food Environments and Obesity and Diabetes. The report demonstrates that people who live near an abundance of fast-food restaurants and convenience stores compared to grocery stores and produce vendors, have a significantly higher prevalence of obesity and diabetes regardless of individual or community income. Given the enormous personal, social, and economic costs of the obesity and diabetes epidemics, we call on state and local policy makers to take steps to ensure that every California community has a healthy food environment.
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Moral
Maze - is there a food crisis?
LISTEN to the show on Radio 4! There are now only 40 days of
world grain stocks left and faced with the dramatically spiraling costs of
wheat, rice and corn, the World Food Programme this week made an unprecedented
appeal for extra funds to help it continue supplying food aid to the poor.
Environmental campaigners say we're now reaping the grim harvest of an orgy of
choice based on cheap food. But is it realistic to call for a massive change in
the pattern of consumption? In the face of the prospect of people growing
hungry is it morally acceptable for us to grow crops for fuel instead of food.
Or is it time to swallow any moral and ethical qualms we have about
technologies like GM and cloning in the interests of feeding the world?
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Exposed:
the great GM crops myth
By
Geoffrey Lean | The Independent UK
Sunday
20 April 2008
Major
new study shows that modified soya produces 10 per cent less food than its
conventional equivalent.
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EU and
US demand for biofuels is pushing up world food prices and increasing climate
emissions. We should feed people, not cars--so join the call for global
standards to clean up the biofuels industry.
Not all
biofuels are bad--but without tough global standards, the biofuels boom will
further undermine food security and worsen global warming. Click here to use
our simple tool to send a message to your head of state before this weekend's
global summit on climate change in Chiba, Japan, and help build a global call
for biofuels regulation.
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Monsanto
U: Agribusiness's Takeover of Public Schools
By
Nancy Scola, AlterNet Posted February 15, 2008.
Thanks
to Bush's new cuts on public funding for land-grant schools, agribusiness is
gaining a huge foothold in the future of our food. I've startled a bug
scientist. "Yeah, now I'm nervous," said Mike Hoffmann, a Cornell
University entomologist and crop specialist who spends his days with cucumber
beetles and small wasps. But he's also in charge of keeping the research
funding flowing at Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. What
have I done to alarm him? I've drawn his attention to the newly released FY 2009
Presidential Budget.
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Understanding
Corn: Towards Social Change or Ecological Disaster?
Posted
by: George Naylor , February 25, 2008
What
can corn teach us about current free market principles? How do we create
sustainable and just solutions for how food is created, produced, and
distributed?
Understanding
corn could be the key to social change that saves the planet and helps us
create democratic communities and local food supplies. Or, left to the
philosophy of corporations like ADM, Cargill, Monsanto and DuPont, ignorance
and inaction will make corn, a gift of Mother Nature and ancient civilizations,
a curse to destroy ecosystems around the world and add to the problem of global
warming. [Read the post]
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Die-off
of bats could hurt area crops
Mystery
illness hits caves in Vt., N.Y.
A
mysterious illness is sickening and killing thousands of hibernating bats in
New York and Vermont, baffling scientists who fear that tens of thousands more
may be dying in abandoned mines and dark caves throughout the Northeast.
Humans
are not believed to be at risk from the disease, but the death of large numbers
of bats could indirectly affect New Englanders: Bats devour crop pests, midges,
and mosquitoes.
"I've
studied bats for 40-something years, and I've never seen anything like this;
it's alarming," said Thomas Kunz, a preeminent bat researcher at Boston
University. "It's frustrating and perplexing, because we don't know what
it is and we don't know how to control it." [full story]
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Is
Eating Local the Best Choice?
By
David Morris, AlterNet
Posted
on September 11, 2007, Printed on September 12, 2007
Some 30 years ago NASA came up with another BIG idea. Assemble vast solar electric arrays in space and beam the energy to earth. The environmental community did not dismiss NASA's vision out of hand. After all, the sun shines 24 hours a day in space. A solar cell on earth harnesses only about four hours equivalent of full sunshine a day. If renewable electricity could be generated more cheaply in space than on earth, what's the problem?
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