Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution

Jamie Oliver is a chef who wants to talk about people who are killing themselves by eating dangerous food. Obesity is killing us in huge numbers, though the media still would rather scare us about homicides, which are relatively rare. We have become so big that there is a significant market for double-sized coffins. The system is rife with misinformation. We are a country where food manufacturers make prominent "no fat" labels when the food (including milk) is full of sugar. One of his messages is that we've got to stop trusting food manufacturers to properly label their food products. What we do to our children by feeding them crappy food is "child abuse." Our schools are complicit, along with food manufacturers. Oliver's talk is an up front and personal look at the perpetrators and victims of the problem, and they are often the same people. But consider, also, that we now live is a system where accountants choose our food, not nutritionists. The low-light of the video is at the 11-minute mark. How well do our kids recognize fruits and vegetables? Not well at all. We are failing miserably at educating our children about food. We can do a lot better, and Jamie offers some promising solutions that all focus on educating our families and children. Oliver offers a positive energy and an urgency that we desperately need. Here's Oliver's wish: jamie-oliver-food-wish

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Walking the walk to encourage sustainable living – No Impact Man

I have just finished reading No Impact Man, an inspiring and informative book by Colin Beavan. Beavan was tired of merely preaching to others about how we need to change our ways with regard to sustainable living. The full title to his book is No Impact Man: The Adventures of a GUILTY Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process. This book project complements Beavan's video documentary.

I made the mistake of thinking that condemning other people's misdeeds somehow made me virtuous. I become, I realize, a member of that class of liberals who allowed themselves to glide by on way to view political gestures and lifestyle concessions and then spent the rest of their energy feeling superior to other people who supposedly don't do as much.... I'd been complaining to anyone who would listen, telling people that we lived in an emergency. Yet, as much as I complained, I lived and acted as though everything was normal. I just let my usual workaday life. Wake up, take my daughter, Isabella, to the babysitter, spend the day riding, pick her up, watch TV, start all over. I didn't feel I could do anything about world problems. After all, if the government wasn't doing anything, what could I do? Write another history book?

Beavan concluded that his frustration was not only with the world, but it was also a frustration with himself.

I was sick of my comfortable and easy pretension of helplessness." Instead of simply preaching at others, he decided to dedicate a year of his life to "researching, developing, and adopting a way of life for me and my small family... to live in the heart of New York City while causing as little harm to the environment as possible. . . . I was not talking about taking easy environmental half-measures, by the way. I was not talking about just using energy-saving fluorescent light bulbs or being a diligent recycler. My idea was to go as far as possible and try to maintain as close as no net environmental impact as I could. I aimed to go zero carbon--yes--but also a zero waste in the ground, zero pollution in the air, zero resources sucked up from the earth, zero toxins in the water. I didn't just want to have no carbon impact. I wanted to have no environmental impact.

An early stage of his regimen involved taking an inventory of the family's trash, and trying to reduce it to zero by working hard to purchase food without packaging (mostly at the Farmer's market). Along the way, you will be shocked by some of his statistics. Food packaging is 20% of American solid waste. 80% of products are made to be used only once. It takes 70-times the amount of our stuff to make our stuff. As a result, 98.5% of the materials we use go straight to the landfill. Every American disposes of 33-pounds of paper every year and 1,600 pounds of trash every year. Nine football fields of Amazonian trees are cut down every minute, despite the fact that the "forests are the planet lungs." Beavan and his wife, Michelle Conlin (she obviously deserves much of the praise for the project), canceled their newspapers, gave up paper tissue and even gave up toilet paper, this last strategy drawing unrelenting attention to the project when it was reported by the New York Times (but also see here). The family traveled only under its own power, walking and using scooters and bicycles (and even a pedal-rickshaw). They ditched their TV (saving them from watching many of the 2000-5000 advertisements to which each American is exposed to each day). They decided not to take any mass transportation, including flying on airlines, which constitutes "about the most carbon intensive thing you can do." Much of this compelling story involves food choice. Beavan and his wife decided that they would not eat fish, because it has been predicted (page 127) that there will be no more ocean fishing by the year 2048. They gave up meat, since the cattle we raise generate more carbon dioxide than all of our transportation combined. They gave up coffee, at least until they couldn't stand it any longer (the story is one of many experiments, not all of them successful). They gave up many of the "necessities" of live because they, like most of us, live in a vicious cycle:

We work our butts off so we can get the stuff, but the making of the stuff destroys the planet, which makes us more depressed, so we think we need more stuff to cheer us up, so we work even harder.

It repeatedly occurred to me that the anti-consumerism angle of No Impact Man dovetailed well with Geoffrey Miller’s explanation of why we are the way we are. You might think that this was an exercise in asceticism, of deprivation and anti-progress, but many of the changes made by Beavan and Conlin had a dramatic life-enhancing effects. For instance, less TV means more time to do the things that the rest of us claim that we want to do (spend time with our family and friends). Not everything was easy, and, in the end, not everything was workable in the long run. For instance, doing without a washing machine might be fun for a few days, but it's a lot of time-consuming work that simply might not be feasible based on the other things that one needs to do with one’s precious daily hours. For the last five months of the program, the family opened its circuit breakers to live without any electricity coming out of a wall socket, giving up air conditioning and lighting their home with beeswax candles (created through sustainable solar power, unlike petroleum candles) and operating minimal lighting generated from a solar panel and some batteries. Beavan and Colin did many other things that many of us might merely talk about doing. They severely limited their use of water, as well. These strict measures were in reaction to the fact that the average American family uses 70-gallons of water per day, one fourth of that for flushing toilets. Beavan offers some ghastly statistics with regard to many areas of the world running out of water, including several states in the southwestern United States. He points out that our dwindling water supply should terrify all of us because much of our food is grown in these water-scarce areas. Speaking of food, Beavan spends quite a few pages questioning the source of our food supply. The average item of food on the American plate travels 1,500 miles to that plate. He and Conlin drew a much smaller circle for their food: 250 miles. He asks to what extent it could be considered "organic" lettuce when it travels 3,000 miles to Whole Foods. Amen to that. No impact Man is a how-to book published on recycled paper, but it is also a story that involves the social impact of attempting to truly going green rather than merely talking about it or green-washing. Truly being green is not always easy on one’s social life given that we live in a culture where social status is highly correlated with conspicuous consumption, including conspicuous waste. One is not able to get around as well as in a petroleum powered vehicle, and one's relatives in distant cities are not always understanding of one's decision to avoid using modern transportation. Dozens of family anecdotes illustrate the intense discipline necessary to accomplish what the this family did for one year. Beavan is an excellent writer who brings an earnest and often humorous inner story to the urgent need to actually do something about the huge set of environmental problems that seems to have our government permanently stalemated. The how-to aspect of the book is addressed throughout the body of the book, as well as through the detailed Appendix with dozens of suggestions and websites full of good information. As I read this book, I wanted to try out many of the ideas suggested therein. I want to strictly minimize buying food with needless packaging. I will entirely stop using plastic throw-away bags from the supermarket. I want to make increased efforts to avoid burning petroleum, so I will attempt to increase my usage of a bicycle for commuting purposes (I already pedal to my job more days than not). I want to do a lot more about electricity usage than buying high-efficiency light bulbs, but I'd definitely want to keep using high-efficiency light bulbs. My wife and I plan to take an inventory of the trash we throw out (discussed at page 35). I am talking to a teacher at the school attended by my children to see whether the school can make use of Beavan's mini version of a low impact lifestyle lasting one week. The most terrible things in life are often ruthlessly ironic. I've written several recent posts about one of the most important aspects of preserving resources and living sustainably: limiting population growth. No Impact Man does not address this issue head-on, and there are hints that it is simply too hot a topic to address in this particular book, given the struggle between Beavan and Colin as to whether they should add yet another human being to their family, above and beyond the charming young daughter they ready had. This, combined with Colin's miscarriage, a painful episode that was mentioned toward the end of the book. No-Impact Man had the desired effect on me. I did not feel that I was on the receiving end of a preaching. Rather, I wanted to do more by changing my own lifestyle and I want to do less preaching . I want to live more by example than by word and I have a long way to go. I was fascinated with the way that the no-impact strategy vividly brought home the widespread deleterious effects of local actions; I now find myself reexamining many things in my own home in a different. This book reminded me that much of the damage being done to the planet is not intentional. Rather, it results from conduct and omissions committed out of ignorance--I was often reminded of Hannah Arendt's concept of "The Banality of Evil." It is my hope and my faith that if people really knew the extent to which their local actions were crapping up the world, they would modify their ways, at least as long as they felt that it was a group effort. Many of us might try many of Beavan's top ten strategies for sustainable living. No Impact Man reminded me that we can do many things even when our government has been hopelessly paralyzed by corporate campaign contributions. But this story was ultimately bittersweet, because I was also reminded me that we really do need government action to complement our individual actions. Environmentally, we're headed on a sharp downward spiral and well-intentioned actions, even heroic one-year exercises, can't successfully turn this ship around.

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Food, Inc.: Taking a closer look at the food you eat

Tonight, my wife and I watched Food, Inc., a highly informative 90-minute documentary that takes a close look at the food we eat and where it comes from. We were expecting to see many revolting pictures of animals being butchered. There certainly were a fair amount of butchering scenes, although the creators of the film constantly focused on presenting useful information rather than trying to shock the viewer. This video was not made to appeal unfairly to the emotions. It was made to present compelling information about an important series of food-related issues. Watching this video reminded me of something that was quite disturbing. The mainstream media and our own government do not starkly peel back the happy veneer of the food production industry. Thus, Food, Inc. also serves as a meta-indictment of those failed institutions of government and the media. Each of the eleven topics covered was compelling, and each of them was presented with a fair amount of balance, despite the fact that most of the corporations running factory farms refused to appear in the video. Consider that Wal-Mart (and a few other companies) was presented as a corporation that was actually trying to make some changes that would benefit the health of Americans-it was not presented as a perfect corporation, but it was given credit for trying to make some changes in the right direction. One corporation in the video was presented as notoriously evil: Monsanto, based in my hometown of St. Louis Missouri. What else could you say about a corporation that refuses to allow farmers to use seeds from their crops, and surreptitiously watches farmers with a team of 75 intimidating investigators, bringing many of them to court for daring to reuse their seeds. This has never before happened in the history of the world that a farmer has lost the right to use his or her own seed crop as he or she wants. If you're thinking, "Well, they should never have signed up to buy that genetically modified seed in the first place," the video will have you thinking again. Some of the victims are non-Monsanto-customer farmers in nearby fields, who were forced to defend themselves in court at great expense after Monsanto accused them of illegally using Montana's product, whereas the seeds often blow onto their property from neighbors' fields. The episode about the seed-washer sued by Monsanto is heartbreaking. After watching Food Inc., you'll never think the same way about corn. I'm not talking about enjoying a fresh meal of corn on the cob--get that image out of your head. I'm talking about highly processed corn. Almost anything you might purchase at a typical grocery store is pumped full of empty calories and questionable substances derived from processed corn (and soybeans). If you're wondering why corn-based sodas and chips are so cheap, and broccoli and peas are so expensive, the answer lies in federal subsidies controlled by huge agribusinesses. Imagine a world where healthy foods were cheap and where foods injected with corn fructose were not subsidized-- that's certainly not the world in which we live. The video reveals that many of the purportedly great variety of fast foods are actually dressed up processed corn. One of the most memorable lines for me was uttered by an especially articulate man who raises organic meat (you know, where animals were not confined in small dark spaces and forced to eat corn, but are actually allowed to eat grass and to graze). He suggested that if huge meat factories (chicken, hogs and beef) were forced to make their factories with transparent walls, people would stop buying their products. It was interesting that the only footage from inside the factory farms was through the use of hidden cameras. The big factory farms refused to give tours to the producers. One exception was a woman farmer who had had enough of it, and went on camera to give a tour of her chicken farm, which was actually run in a much more humane way than most of the dark enclosed factories where the great majority of America's chickens are raised and slaughtered. Even her operation, considerably more humane than most factory farms (it actually was open to sunlight) still wasn't a pretty sight. Another thing I found revolting was the way that it illegal immigrants work hard to produce food for the rest of America, some of them for a dozen years or more, but they are unceremoniously rounded up from their trailers up in a constant stream of police raids. All of this while the companies that have made constant use of the hard labor of these undocumented people are left unscathed. There are very few raids for illegal immigrants at the factory farms-this would interfere with the profitable assembly line. Image by Raman at Flickr (with permission) Image by Raman at Flickr (with permission) There's a lot more to Food, Inc. then I've described in this brief post. I highly recommend that you watch Food Inc. if you care about what you're putting in your stomach. Even if you think you have a cast-iron stomach, take a look at Food Inc. and you'll be primed to start eating more smartly. Although much of the information presented in this video is disturbing, the video is full of good suggestions for what you can do about these problems. So is the movie's website (with regard to each of these topics, simply click the "Learn More" link).

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But wait, there’s more!

It's black Friday today, and I was somehow reminded of Ron Popeil, of Chop-o-Matic fame, inventor of many well-known household products. He has sold more than a billion dollars worth of rotisseries. I noticed that many of Popeil's infomercials are available on YouTube, including this one featuring his food dehydrator: Popeil, who was quite successful as an inventor, was equally impressive as a marketer. He explains his approach to inventing and marketing here. Tonight it occurred to me that even though I saw Popeil's commercials decades ago, I remembered much of Popeil's shtick. I especially remember the audiences applauding on cue. It was somehow effective even though I knew that these people had been paid to applaud on cue. What I didn't know was how the audience members were paid, and it was not with money, as you'll read here. As you can read in the same article, Popeil is now getting ready to market what he characterizes as his final invention, a deep fryer.

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