Category: Food

How Junk Food Can End Obesity

rickpace1Leave a comment

Harnessing our inner junk food cravings …and the fast food nation…to improve our nutrition.

Late last year, in a small health-food eatery called Cafe Sprouts in Oberlin, Ohio, I had what may well have been the most wholesome beverage of my life. The friendly server patiently guided me to an apple-blueberry-kale-carrot smoothie-juice combination, which she spent the next several minutes preparing, mostly by shepherding farm-fresh produce into machinery. The result was tasty, but at 300 calories (by my rough calculation) in a 16-ounce cup, it was more than my diet could regularly absorb without consequences, nor was I about to make a habit of $9 shakes, healthy or not.

Inspired by the experience nonetheless, I tried again two months later at L.A.’s Real Food Daily, a popular vegan restaurant near Hollywood. I was initially wary of a low-calorie juice made almost entirely from green vegetables, but the server assured me it was a popular treat. I like to brag that I can eat anything, and I scarf down all sorts of raw vegetables like candy, but I could stomach only about a third of this oddly foamy, bitter concoction. It smelled like lawn clippings and tasted like liquid celery. It goes for $7.95, and I waited 10 minutes for it.

I finally hit the sweet spot just a few weeks later, in Chicago, with a delicious blueberry-pomegranate smoothie that rang in at a relatively modest 220 calories. It cost $3 and took only seconds to make. Best of all, I’ll be able to get this concoction just about anywhere. Thanks, McDonald’s!

If only the McDonald’s smoothie weren’t, unlike the first two, so fattening and unhealthy. Or at least that’s what the most-prominent voices in our food culture today would have you believe.

An enormous amount of media space has been dedicated to promoting the notion that all processed food, and only processed food, is making us sickly and overweight. In this narrative, the food-industrial complex—particularly the fast-food industry—has turned all the powers of food-processing science loose on engineering its offerings to addict us to fat, sugar, and salt, causing or at least heavily contributing to the obesity crisis. The wares of these pimps and pushers, we are told, are to be universally shunned.

The Atlantic Monthly Article

Farm Free or Die

rickpace1Leave a comment

New Englanders have never been shy about revolting against what they see as unfair food regulations. Remember that whole thing?

So perhaps it’s not so surprising that in Maine, towns have been staging another revolution: They’ve declared independence from state and federal regulations on locally produced foods.

In May, the tiny Isle of Haut became the tenth town in the state to pass what’s known as a food sovereignty ordinance. Essentially, these resolutions claim that small local food producers don’t have to abide by state or federal licensing and inspection regulations if they are selling directly to consumers.

The NPR Report

Slave Labor and the Food You Eat

rickpace1Leave a comment

A recent briefing paper by the International Labor Rights Forum and the Warehouse Workers United noted labor abuses at Thai shrimp producer, Narong Seafood, which has been a major supplier to Walmart and a leading shrimp processor for the U.S. market. But despite the prevalence of abuse, the paper recommends that Walmart not drop Narong as a supplier, but instead “work with labor and human rights activists in Thailand to ensure the rights of the workers who produce shrimp for Walmart in Thailand are respected.”

Forced labor, including debt bondage, also continues to sustain palm oil plantations in Malaysia, also on the Tier 2 Watch List, and Indonesia. (Palm oil is used in lots of processed foods, from Dunkin Donuts to Girl Scout cookies.) Cargill, the largest importer of palm oil and trader of 25 percent of the world’s palm oil supply, says it has a policy of not using any slave or child labor. But the Rainforest Action Network has alleged that one of Cargill’s palm oil suppliers used slave labor on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia.

Even in the U.S., food workers aren’t exempt from abuse and even slavery. As our NPR colleague Yuki Noguchi last month, men with intellectual disabilities who worked at an Iowa turkey-processing plant suffered severe verbal and physical abuse for over 20 years. A jury eventually awarded the men approximately $3,000,000, the largest jury verdict in the history of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The NPR Article

How many slaves work for you?

http://slaveryfootprint.org/

Monsanto, Soybeans, and an Indiana Farmer

rickpace1Leave a comment

What does a Supreme Court case about the sale of soybean seeds have to do with life sciences? A lot, says the U.S. Solicitor General and life sciences attorneys.

Bowman v. Monsanto concerns farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman who bought seed from one of Monsanto’s licensed seed producers and did a first and then, much later, a second seeding. Monsanto claimed Bowman had infringed the patent and the technology agreement that was in force when he had purchased the seed. The lower courts found there had been infringement.

The “first sale” or “patent exhaustion” doctrine provides that the first unrestricted sale by a patent owner of a patented product exhausts the patent owner’s control over that particular item. Bowman petitioned the Supreme Court for review, arguing that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit erred by refusing to find patent exhaustion in patented seeds after an authorized sale and by creating an exception to the doctrine of patent exhaustion for self-replicating technologies. Against the SG’s advice, the court granted review.

In his amicus brief to the court filed Jan. 8, the SG argued that the Federal Circuit’s ruling that patent exhaustion did not apply should be affirmed and stated that not affirming the ruling would also affect the “enforcement of patents for man-made cell lines, DNA molecules, some nanotechnologies, and other technologies that involve self-replicating features.” Companies marketing patented recombinant plasmids and transformed cell lines capable of replication “would lose much of their value if purchasers of patented bacteria or other self-replicating products could reproduce and sell those items free from the restraints of patent law,” the SG wrote.

Howard Bremer told BNA that the court’s affirming the Federal Circuit’s ruling would be the best solution and would prompt the continuation of the “motivation factor for the private sector to license self-replicating technologies for development and marketing under the auspices of licensing arrangements with universities and thereby serve the public interest.”

This is a case to watch.

(Source: Bloomberg News)

Food Waste

rickpace11 Comment

Forty percent of the food Americans have available to them goes uneaten, according to a report released this week by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Most of this nutrient-rich uneaten food ends up rotting in landfills.