The food-waste debate could use a pinch of common sense

By macleans.ca - Monday, January 21, 2013 at 9:35 AM - 0 Comments

Tom Ryaboi

That banana looks a bit brown. The yogourt is past its “best before” date. And no one else is eating those end slices, so why should you?

In the typical Canadian kitchen, the banana, yogourt and the bread crusts—and a lot more besides—are prime candidates for the garbage can or composter. With food cheap and plentiful, we’ve regrettably become a nation of picky eaters. An estimated $27 billion worth of food, or 40 per cent of what’s produced annually in Canada, is wasted between field and table, according to a recent study from the George Morris Centre in Guelph, Ont. More than half of that occurs at home.

This is not just a Canadian concern. In 2011 the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations estimated 33 per cent of global food production, or 1.3 billion tonnes, is wasted per year. And last week, a report from the British Institution of Mechanical Engineers pushed that number up to an astounding 50 per cent—half of all food produced in the world is lost, misdirected or thrown away due to poor harvesting techniques, spoilage, inefficient distribution processes and overly dainty consumer preferences. Continue…

What you’ll be eating soon

By Kate Lunau - Friday, April 20, 2012 at 10:16 AM - 0 Comments

Photo Illustration by Adam Makarenko

It’s the year 2035. Craving a burger and a beer, a hungry traveller wanders into a nondescript gastropub, the type that’s found in almost any city. What’s on the menu? As an appetizer, there’s a salad of blue lettuce sprinkled with elderflowers and cloudberries, or a Zanzibari pizza: Indian-spiced rabbit meat served on a piece of naan. For the main course, the traveller can choose between fish—the “catch of the day” is plucked from a nearby indoor fish farm—or he can order a burger, made of cow, bison, chicken or pork, fresh out of the bioreactor. “We have an excellent meat-grower,” the waitress says.

This is the scenario imagined by Chicago-based writer Josh Schonwald in his new book, The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food. For the past several years, Schonwald has been on a mission to discover what the “salad, meat, seafood and pad Thai of the future” will be. He’s explored everything from genetically engineered foods—like a cherry tomato modified to carry a lemon basil gene, which is said to be delicious—to meat grown in a test tube. Canadian scientists are working on this too, building healthier hot dogs and other processed foods.

In an age of rampant foodie-ism that prizes the traditional, local and organic above all, writer Michael Pollan’s famous advice not to eat anything packaged or anything with more than five ingredients has become a well-known principle. Schonwald disagrees, criticizing what he calls the “rising tide of food-specific neo-Luddism” that insists food and technology shouldn’t mix. If we’re going to feed the planet, solutions won’t just come from farms, but from the lab, too—and if scientists can engineer food that’s tastier, more nutritious and sustainable, all the better.

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GiornoWatch Extra: Children of the Corncob

By kadyomalley - Thursday, July 10, 2008 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Speaking of Kory Teneycke, congratulations are in order for being the first of the new arrivals – not counting the new Chief of Staff himself, of course – to find himself the subject of one of Jane Taber’s signature profiles in The Globe and Mail.

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jokers to the left, jokers to the right…

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, June 3, 2008 at 10:50 PM - 0 Comments

Yes, the food crisis is real. No, I don’t pretend to fully understand its causes, nor do I trust much that I have read about how to resolve it. But long before most other media jumped all over it, the FT was running serious and sober analysis of the problem. The paper has had a great microsite up for months, and has been running a very useful series of analysis pieces. Today’s focused on Africa, and the big takeaway, from my perspective, is the extent to which Africa has been screwed by ideologues of the left and the right.

From the right, a distressingly familiar story:

Much of the agricultural support apparatus that African governments used back in the 1970s – state marketing boards to which farmers sold their produce, across-the-board fertiliser and seed subsidies, strategic reserves of grain in case of food crisis, target prices maintained by official intervention – were dismantled, often at the urging of the World Bank and other aid donors, which regarded them as wasteful, prone to corruption or positively damaging. (Similar institutions persist in European and American farming, however.) But the vacuum left by the wholesale withdrawal of the state was often not filled by private businesses, leaving farmers disconnected from domestic and international markets.

From the left, today’s colossal idiocy of the day:

Andrew Dorward, an academic at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, says that adoption of GM crops resistant to herbicide would, for example, be disastrous for many poor households: the crops would allow the replacement of hand-weeding, which is a big source of income for many.

Which, of course, is why we should have workers dig ditches with spoons.

All is well in Quebec. And here's how to fix it.

By selley - Monday, May 26, 2008 at 1:17 PM - 0 Comments

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Must-reads: Dan Gardner on African agriculture; Rosie DiManno on Khale Farm and Mazar-i-Sharif; Rex Murphy on the Democratic campaign; Thomas Walkom on Omar Khadr; Barbara Yaffe on apologies; Don MacPherson and Lysiane Gagnon on Bouchard-Taylor; Don Martin on the Lynch Report.

What Charles and Gérard hath wrought
Lysiane Gagnon, writing in The Globe and Mail, believes the perception that Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor “put Quebec’s 400-year-old culture on the same footing as the various cultures of newcomers” in their landmark report will prove excellent fodder for the likes of Mario Dumont and Pauline Marois. And while the report is “an interesting reflection on immigration and the need to provide jobs for immigrants,” Gagnon can’t help thinking that having concluded the reasonable accommodations debate was almost entirely a fabrication, its authors might have abided by the “if it doesn’t itch, don’t scratch it” principle rather than “rewrit[ing] the landscape.”

The Toronto Star‘s Haroon Siddiqui can’t understand how Bouchard and Taylor could on one hand argue that “the right to freedom of religious includes the right to show it,” and that legislating otherwise would alienate certain communities from the public service, and on the other hand suggest judges, crown prosecutors, police officers and certain other officials be “barred from wearing religious signs and clothing on the job.” He suggests this was a “sop” to the Bloc Québécois and the Council on the Status of Women.

The Globe‘s Jeffrey Simpson agrees the whole mess was “much ado about nothing” in that the incidents that gave rise to it were “exaggerated to the point of deformation by journalistic sensationalism and political opportunism.” But by “talk[ing] these tricky matters through,” he suggests Quebec society “may have slain certain demons in the process.”

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May 9 shall henceforth be known as National Embarrassment Day

By selley - Friday, May 9, 2008 at 1:01 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Daphne Bramham on polygamy; Jeffrey Simpson on the refugee system; Susan Riley and Chantal Hébert on l’affaire Bernier-Couillard; Rosie DiManno on the Afghan food shortage; Colby Cosh on uniting the Alberta left.

Bad, Canada. Bad!
From the Creston Valley to the Alberta oil sands to Ottawa—especially Ottawa—we should all be thoroughly ashamed of ourselves.

“Two generations have grown up during the period the B.C. government has hidden behind undisclosed legal opinions that polygamy is the cost of religious freedom and because someone somewhere says the government might lose in court,” the inimitable Daphne Bramham writes in the Vancouver Sun. Texas prosecutors have “plenty of evidence that abuse is endemic” among the dozens of children seized from their parents, she notes, but the province still hasn’t sent “any lawyers or social workers down to check on [Canadians among the victims], find out whether they went there willingly or even to take a look at what evidence Texas has collected.” It is time, she argues—still, again, and always—to put an end to this national embarrassment. (We particularly like her idea that the children of Bountiful might eventually launch a class action suit against the B.C. government for allowing them to be treated like low-grade veal. It would be the perfect comeuppance, we think.)

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Bring her home to stop the whining

By selley - Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 1:04 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Doug Saunders on “Americanizing” the Afghanistan mission; Christie Blatchford on rescuing child abuse victims; James Travers on the food crisis; John Ivison on the doctor shortage; Don Martin on Brenda Martin.

Departmental briefings
Criticism and advice for the ministries of Foreign Affairs, Citizenship and Immigration, Finance and Defence. And a finger in the eye for the Liberals.

The Calgary Herald‘s Don Martin implores Foreign Affairs to get Brenda Martin (who is clearly of no relation) home from Mexico as soon as is humanly possible—guilty, innocent, whatever; he just wants the whining to end. Continue…